Forever Changes (4 page)

After dinner on Sunday, the “so” Brianna had been waiting for finally came.  “So,” Dad said as he handed her a dish to dry. “Have you picked an MIT info session yet?”

Brianna sighed.  “No.”

Dad washed a pot in silence for a minute.  “You told me you would.”

“I know, I know.”

“I need to be able to believe what you tell me, honey,” Dad said, still looking only at the pot he was washing.  Ugh.  She hated that he was playing it this way.  Instead of giving her all kinds of reasons why she should go that she could argue with, he was just pulling the “I need to be able to trust you, that’s the kind of relationship we have,” which was his strongest card.  She was always amazed at how Stephanie and Melissa pretended to be somebody for their parents that they really weren’t, and as much as he got on her nerves, she was glad she never had to do that with Dad.

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll do it this week.  I promise.”

“Really?”

“Yes, okay!  I promised.  I don’t break my promises.”

“I know you don’t,” Dad said.  “It’s something I admire about you.”

“Jeez, Dad, I said I would call, you don’t have to keep laying it on so thick.”

Dad stopped washing and looked  at her.  “I’m not blowing smoke up … I’m being straight with you, Bri.  I want you to do something with your incredible brain, so you don’t end up working at Bargain Zone, and I
do
admire you.”

Brianna was about to respond, but Dad jumped in, “not because of the CF, but because of the kind of person you are.”

Brianna felt really uncomfortable.  “Thanks,” she said quietly, and stowed away everything she wanted to say about how even spending the time filling out applications to go to a college she’d never live to get a degree from was pointless. And how she had to stop preparing for things because there wasn’t going to be a future to prepare for.    It was actually a relief not to say any of that stuff, because as she turned it over in her mind, it felt scary.

            Later, Dad was in the garage tinkering with his bike, and Brianna sat alone at the kitchen table with her homework spread out in front of her.  It had been light out when she sat down, so the only light on in the house now was the one lonely light that hung over the table.  She’d already done all the homework she didn’t mind doing, and she’d talked to Stephanie once, and Melissa twice, though one of those calls was her talking Melissa through an easy pre-calc problem, so that really didn’t count.  She reached into her bag for her history book (“The Slab of Tedium” Melissa called it), and her hand found the CD Adam had given her.

She took it out of the case. “Love:  Forever Changes” was scrawled on it.  She put it into her CD player and slipped the earbuds into her ear.  Even if it sucked, it would give her something to think about besides the incredibly boring history chapter she had to read.

The music was weird—it wasn’t at all like anything she could place. She guessed it was rock, because there were guitars, but there were a lot of trumpets and violins too.  The guy sang in this kind of fruity voice, and the lyrics reminded Brianna of “step into the freezer with uncle Ebenezer” or whatever the crap was that the stoner kids always played at their parties, but then weird lines about people dying and blood  coming out of the bathtub and people with snot caked on their clothes kept jumping out at her.

As she was finishing the questions on the chapter, she heard this:

For the time that I’ve been given’s such a little while

And the things that I must do consist of more than style

There  are places that I’m going

This is the only thing that I am sure of

And that’s all that lives is gonna die

And there’ll always be some people here to wonder why

And for every happy hello there will be goodbye.

The song went on and on.  When it ended, Brianna hit the back button and listened to it again, pausing  and backing it up as she came to the part about how short your time is.

This, she thought, is exactly why I don’t want to apply to college.  She had never been able to put it into words, but she felt something she realized was relief.  Here was somebody singing—okay, in a weird song  that she could never play for Stephanie or Melissa—something she’d been feeling but had been unable to put into words.  She couldn’t apply to college. There just wasn’t enough time.

And on her third listen to the song (“You Set the Scene”, Adam’s chicken scratch on the jewel case insert told her), what struck her was the part about how there would be people left to wonder why, and she had this image of Dad standing over her grave and crying.  Just for a minute, she thought that would be the absolute worst part about dying.  First Mom broke his heart, and soon Brianna was going to break it again. As much as she hated being a burden to him, hated the sacrifices he made for her, she felt even worse about the idea of making him sad forever.

The CD ended, and Brianna sat there in the silence under the lonely light and cried.

Before she left the house on Monday, Brianna wrote a note that said “Call MIT” and taped it where she’d be sure to see it, on a bottle of Gatorade in the back of the fridge.

At school, she plopped down at a table and turned on her CD player. She’d woken up thinking about this weird music, and it was satisfying to hear it again—like eating a fluffernutter after Mr. Eccles got her thinking about fluffernutters.

She was only two minutes into the first song—“Alone Again Or” (Or What? Brianna wondered, but the song, which didn’t even have the word “or” in it, gave no clues) when she saw Todd step into the caf.  He obviously saw here, but he pretended he didn’t. He  performed an elaborate head-slapping show like he’d forgotten something, and walked out again.

She sighed as the guy on the CD said he’d be alone again tonight.  Well, that was certainly it for Todd.  It wasn’t like he’d been some great love or anything; they had been friends, and they’d helped each other out.  She made sure Todd didn’t fail Algebra 2 for a second time; he made sure that she didn’t die a virgin.  Brianna had given Todd strategies to get through math at a ‘C’ level, but she couldn’t really make him get it on a deep level, and she certainly couldn’t create in his brain even the palest shadow of her appreciation for the beauty of math.  And Todd, for his part, hadn’t been able to make Brianna understand what the big deal about sex was.

Still, she was able to check something off her “Things to do Before I Die” checklist because of him, and they had been friends, or at least friendly enough that he wouldn’t pull cheesy moves like pretending he didn’t see her.  Well, if that’s how he was, she was better off without him, which was what Dad was always telling her anyway.  Still, she felt like she knew what would happen next:  he’d continue to pretend she didn’t exist, then he’d be at his locker with some sophomore girl with big boobs who looked twenty, ostentatiously kissing her all the time and pretending that he’d never been with the senior girl who looked twelve.

She scrawled, “Don’t you dare come to my funeral, loser” on a piece of paper.  She wondered if she should fold it up and put flower doodles on the outside and slip it into his locker like she had a couple of times when they’d arranged tutoring sessions.

She laughed to herself at the thought, but it started her coughing.  Fortunately, it didn’t last long, and she was able to pull what she hoped was a very discreet tissue-to-mouth-phlegm-spit maneuver.  She didn’t like the coughing, but she was used to it, and everybody understood.  The spitting, though, never stopped being gross and embarrassing, but once she had seen what that stuff looked like on a tissue, there was  no way she was going to swallow it.

She smiled to herself remembering Melissa’s reply when she’d told her that.  The CD played on, and Brianna found herself  hoping that Melissa and Stephanie would be late.  She wanted a few more minutes with this weird music that her weird math teacher had made.

The music got her thinking about Molly, and then she did something really stupid.  She reached into one of the many zipper pockets on her backpack and took out the envelope she had carried there for the last five months but hadn’t  looked at since last April.  Just seeing Molly’s handwriting on the outside of the envelope felt like an electric shock, and Brianna knew she might start bawling.  Put it away, she told herself, look at it later.

But her hands kept going, opening the envelope and seeing Molly’s note. Way too short. Way way too short.  Why didn’t you write more, Molly?  Why didn’t you tell me something useful about how to do this?

Hey Girl!  Looks like I’m on the home stretch here.  I hope you’ll read this poem at my funeral.  I like it a lot.  I love you and I’m sorry I have to go.

Love,

Molly

Thirty-six words.  Just over 1.7 words for every year Molly had lived.  And then a photocopy of a poem by Robert Frost called “Good-By and Keep Cold” that Brianna had read a hundred times, that she read again now, that she couldn’t really make sense of, except, “I have to be gone for a season or so.” Now her tears were really about to come flooding out, but a tap on her shoulder snapped her back into the cafeteria.

She hastily stuffed the envelope back into her backpack and looked at the tapper. Adam, smiling this big smile.  She was relieved that somebody had pulled her out of Molly’s funeral, but she was annoyed that it wasn’t Stephanie or Melissa.  Right time, wrong person.

“Did you get a chance to listen to the CD?” Adam asked.

“Yeah,” Brianna said. “You know what?  I really like it!  I mean, it’s kind of freaky.  I don’t know.  I like the way it’s kind of pretty and psycho at the same time.”

Adam got this goofy, enthusiastic look on his face.  “I’m totally there.  I listened to it once and thought it was the weirdest piece of crap ever, but then I couldn’t do anything else until I listened to it again.  I listened to it probably five times last night.”

So it wasn’t just her.  That was a relief.

“I downloaded a bunch more songs from other albums if you’d like them,” Adam said.

“Sure!” Brianna replied.  Adam reached into his bag and pulled out a CD.  Adam had printed the cover of some old Love album and put it in the jewel case; it was printed so small that Brianna couldn’t make out much except that one of the guys was wearing flood pants and ankle boots.  Which one was Eccles, thirty-five years and fifty pounds ago?

“I was really into the lyrics, so I downloaded all of them  and printed them in the booklet,” Adam said.

“Cool!” Brianna said with unfeigned enthusiasm.  As she took the CD, she saw Katie and Keianna, two of her “friends” watching her with Adam the geek and whispering and giggling.  They went over and sat down with Chris and Jim, two more people Brianna would have once called friends, and she felt all four of them looking  at her.

Brianna took the CD and put it in her bag and thought this semi-dorky guy had done more for her in the last two days than most of the people she’d once considered friends ever had.

“Thanks a lot, Adam,” she said.

“Okay, well, I better go,” Adam said, looking over her shoulder.  “Bye!” he called as he practically ran away.

Stephanie arrived about one second later.

“Hey, Bri, how’s your hot friend?” Stephanie said, grinning.

“Shut up.  He’s good.”

“I saw his body language.  I don’t know, Bri, I think he likes you.”

“He does not.  We’re math buddies,  and he made me a CD and—”

“He made you a
CD?
And he doesn’t like you?  Yeah, okay.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Making somebody a CD is a way of saying, ‘I was thinking about you when I was home.  Alone.  In my
bedroom
. With a box of tissues and—’”

“Okay, okay, you’re disgusting.  Are you just trying to make me lose my appetite so you can have more chocolate munchkins?  Cause it’s not gonna work.”

Stephanie started talking about how Kevin was starting to act weird, and Brianna knew this meant there was breakup drama on the way.

When Mr. Thompson, the college counselor, finally ended Thursday afternoon’s senior class assembly at the final bell of the day, Brianna bolted out of the auditorium.  She could hear Stephanie calling “Bri!” behind her, but she  had to get out of there.  She jumped into the Sunfire and put-putted up the street, swinging the car around the corner without hitting the brake.  That felt a little better, but still not good.  She could go home, but today was Dad’s day off, and she really didn’t want to talk to anybody right then.

Her phone started playing those familiar notes in her purse—probably Stephanie or Melissa. It was definitely somebody who was planning to go to college, and probably somebody who wanted her math skills to help them out.  She let the call go to voicemail.

Brianna drove until she reached the beach.  The snack shack was shut for the winter even though it was still September, but Mario’s House of Clams was open.  She grabbed a 24-ounce ice blue Gatorade and her enzyme pills out of her bag and went in and got some fries.  She poured a bunch of salt on them and walked over to the beach. She wondered idly what the volume of this weird French fry container was.  It was a rectangular solid, but it sloped up from the bottom like a cone.  So neither formula would really fit.  One more thing in life that seemed simple but was actually really complex.

There was hardly anybody on the beach.  It was a sunny day, but it was windy, and it was barely 70 degrees out.  She sat in the sand and watched the waves and ate her fries.  She tried hard not to think.  Some guy came walking along the beach with his Golden Retriever, and as he chucked a stick into the freezing cold water and the dumb dog went right in after it.  Brianna thought about how this simple act of a guy throwing a stick for his dog needed some pretty complicated math just to figure out how fast the stick might be going, or to describe the path it took into the water.   It would be to account for that end-over-end thing the stick was doing. Describing the arc of a tennis ball would probably be easier.

Her phone rang again.  She took it out of her purse and looked at the caller ID.  Melissa.  She’d call her later.  She turned the phone off.

A cold breeze blew in off the waves,  and Brianna was starting to wish she’d brought a sweatshirt.  A plain sweatshirt, though—not a UMASS or URI or Dartmouth, or BC, BU,  or any of those other ones that everybody was wearing around school these days.

She couldn’t believe that in in the middle of the senior class assembly  Mr. Thompson had said,“We are all facing challenges—whether you are battling  a difficult situation at home, or cystic fibrosis, or muscular dystrophy—” and everybody had looked at Brianna and Keith Who is in a Wheelchair. Then he went on about how every adult in the building was here to help them win their personal battle, or scale their own personal mountain, or something.  Then he’d reminded everyone that now was the time that the college process started to get serious.

Brianna grabbed a rock from the sand and tried to throw it in an inverse parabola.  She picked up another one and tried again. She did this for a long time.  So long that she started to feel a little bit tired from the effort of throwing rocks, which got her depressed since she’d been throwing rocks to try to stop thinking.  She thought of getting  her CD player, but she didn’t really need to: Love’s songs were playing in her mind on what seemed to be an endless loop.  Little bits of the album kept popping into her brain, as though it had become her personal soundtrack.  Still, if she wanted to hear more than a few seconds of a song at a time, she’d need the CD.  She threw another rock and decided to go back to the car and get it.  Before she could even turn around, though, she heard a voice behind her.  “Curves … acceleration … speed.  The very heart and soul of the calculus, here … on our own … humble beach!”

It was Mr. Eccles, sitting in the sand.  Everybody said he was at the beach every morning in the summer, but, Brianna had never seen him before.  It was kind of weird to run into a teacher out in the real world like this, especially when you were trying to get away from everybody.

His face was so red it was practically purple, and he was huffing and puffing like he’d just run there all the way from school.  “Hey,” she said.  “Are you okay?  You want some Gatorade or something? I haven’t even opened it yet, so there isn’t any backwash or anything.”

“Ah, the magical concoction from the … University of … Florida.  No, Ms. Pelletier, I can’t take the … electrolytes … from your grasp …”

He looked awful, and Brianna wondered if maybe she should call 911.  This was weird, and embarrassing.  She worried that if he passed out, she might have to give him mouth-to-mouth.  She wondered if running to get Mario from the House of Clams to get him to do the CPR would cost Mr. Eccles his life and whether it would be worth it.

“Really, my dad gets these for like ten cents apiece at work, and I have another one in my bag.”  She held it out, thinking, please don’t keel over, old man, just take the Gatorade.

“Very well …” he said, taking the Gatorade and twisting the top open. “Your … intellect … is exceeded … only by your kindness.”

“Uh, do you want me to call somebody?” Brianna asked, hoping he’d ask her to call his wife or something and make this somebody else’s problem.  He shook his head no.  He wasn’t breathing as hard now.

So much for her time alone to think.  But then again, that wasn’t really working out too well anyway.  She just wanted to call Melissa back and go home.  But she didn’t feel like she could leave her teacher sitting here.  She felt awkward, so she went down and picked up another rock and chucked it into the surf.  She threw ten more rocks, pausing every now and then to cough and spit into the sea. Since Eccles was practically keeling over behind her, she figured he probably wouldn’t be too scandalized by seeing her spit.

“Ms. Pelletier!” Mr. Eccles called out.  Oh no.  Now she was going to have to call 911.

“Um, yeah?”

“I want to express my gratitude for the beverage.  Its revivifying powers were not exaggerated by the television advertising.”  He was smiling now, and looking a little bit less like he was going to croak.  “I come here to ponder the infinite, and today I apparently almost touched it.”

“I’m sorry.  Are you sure you don’t need a doctor or something?”

“Ah, Ms. Pelletier, I have seen enough of doctors to last a lifetime.  They are tiresome even under the best of circumstances.”

“I know what you  mean,” Brianna answered.  Doctors
were
tiresome, but not nearly as tiresome as social workers.

“So Ms. Carelli informs me,” Mr. Eccles said.   He’d obviously looked at  her 504 plan and talked to the nurse.  Even thought it was a good teacher thing to do, she’d wanted to get some more of the school year under her belt before she became That Poor Girl. “I dare say you know better than I.”

Brianna smiled.  She liked the fact that he hadn’t said anything about her battle or her courage.  She decided she could chance making fun of him a little bit.  “Indeed I do, sir, indeed I do.”  Eccles was getting to his feet, so Brianna felt like she could flee now, go home and see Dad and call Melissa.

Eccles laughed.  “I do appreciate your kindness,” he said.  “I suppose I can now resume contemplating the infinite, though of course the ocean, despite its appearance from here,  is not infinite.”

“Okay then.  See you tomorrow.”

“Yes.  It is looking increasingly likely that you will.”

She hoped he’d be okay.  He was a freak, but he was also kind of cool.  For a second, she thought about asking him what it had been like to be in a band, what he thought “Maybe the People Would Be The Times or Between Clark and Hilldale” was about, or to tell him how much that record he’d played on was starting to mean to her.  But that would be too embarrassing, so she  started up the Sunfire and went home.