Nothing Special (12 page)

Renee is asleep. I don't think she likes me as much as she used to. Maybe it's not a good idea to spend several hours convincing someone you just met that you're the biggest jerk on the planet, huh? I've only talked about Gus with her too. Haven't really brought up you or Jerri or Andrew. I did tell her my life is an ongoing horror movie. She rolled her eyes, shook her head, said I didn't know crap about anything, and then she sort of passed out.

Now we're in Georgia.

Maybe I'll buy Renee something at the next stop. A candy bar? She's a vegetarian. Some broccoli? She seems pretty sad.

You know what I don't like? Being punched.

Back in the bad old days of Felton yore, I was shoved and elbowed and knocked on the ground at recess—and kicked in the gut while lying on the ground. Good times. I used to be angrier about it. Now I'm a different person (except when Gus punched me). Maybe I should do something for kids who get punched a lot. Like what? Buy them candy bars? Broccoli?

Here's weird: while that crap was all happening back in those bad old days, when the guidance counselor asked if I got picked on, I'd tell him no. “Not me! I'm grrreat!” I wasn't great. I was very, very mad. And also terrified, but not of other kids, exactly. Scared of not being able to do anything (like ask for help) about the crap without just catching more hell, maybe. Could a guidance counselor stop kids from hating me?

No. I don't know.

No.

Scared that there was no control, no stop button. I had no control over anything at all.

Do I have control now, or did I just get lucky? Clearly me turning into an athlete like my dad has nothing to do with control. I have athlete genes, that's all. Nobody caused it. I didn't try to become an athlete.

Now my oldest friend punches me?

Upside-down world. I got lucky for a while, but I'm still cursed. I still don't have any control. Shouldn't I be terrified?

I'm not. I'm riding a bus in the middle of the night in Georgia next to a girl named Renee. She's a good person. I can tell. I'm not afraid.

After Gus punched me, I asked to drive, because I wanted to be in control, I guess (so I could drive us off a cliff if he hit me again? I don't know), and then we drove in silence. He didn't say he wanted to go home. He didn't apologize. The side of my damn nut throbbed and the edge of my eye was kind of blurry because my face was swelling a little. (I pressed the Coke can on it.) Gus just sat there in a stupor.

The sun shone in the sky (total blue). We burned through some awesome, amazing, totally un-Midwestern hills and crossed over this big, fat chunk of forest-stuffed water called Nickajack Lake—which I've totally never seen anything like, except sort of by the Mississippi in Dubuque (and Nickajack was much bigger and grander)—until we got to Chattanooga, which actually has what I think are mountains. I think. Not like Colorado TV mountains, but there were pretty dang tall spots on these ridges.

Chattanooga. There's something funny about Chattanooga. Gus used to sing this line over and over and over to the tune of “Chattanooga Choo Choo”: “Pardon me, Roy, is that the cat that chewed your new shoes?” He sang this dumb line instead of the “Chattanooga Choo Choo” lyrics (
Pardon
me, boy, is that the Chattanooga choo choo?
). I looked over at Gus when we got to the “Welcome to Chattanooga” sign, and I sang it to him, “Pardon me, Roy, is that the cat that chewed your new shoes?”

“Yeah,” Gus nodded. “I was just thinking about that too.”

Then Gus's iPhone beeped. “Maddie?” I asked.

“Dad. He wants to know how the trip to Ann Arbor went.”

“You tell him just super, okay? Really super.”

“Ha.” Gus swallowed and looked out to his right, stared off into nothingness.

Then I got a little worried about Jerri calling my phone. I'd really have liked to use Gus's to call her, but I felt nervous about asking him because he was a little psycho, apparently. Then I felt a bit anxious. Then I kept driving, feeling nerves about Jerri building up in my body until I was seriously anxious.

While the nerves built and boiled, we didn't say crap, just drove, for like two hours—all the way, Aleah, to Atlanta, Georgia, which is a freaking giant-ass city that doesn't look like Chicago at all (spread out forever and ever without the totally intense downtown or waterfront and rivers).

Right around the time we hit the first mighty Atlanta suburbs Gus said, looking down at his phone, “Oh. I think the time changed. Yeah, definitely. iPhone changed. It's an hour later than I thought it was. We're in the East for real.”

I nodded and responded, “You know I could have you arrested for aggravated assault, you ass.”

“Probably should add criminal damage to property while you're at it,” Gus said.

“What?”

“Criminal damage.”

“Really?” I was a little confused. “Did you take a dump in my shoe or something?”

“You left your phone charger out on the floor last night, so I cut it into little pieces and then flushed it down the motel toilet.”

“Oh my God,” I said. My hands and feet got icy, which I believe is an indication of complete terror.

“I've been kind of crazy today, I think,” Gus said. “I've done some bad stuff.” He started sniffling again. “It's…It's unpardonable…It's…You're really my only friend, man. Not just today. Remember that poster of you and Roy Ngelale? That sort of gross sex picture that was all over the school?”

“Yes.”

“Shit, man.” Gus shook his head. “I did it.”

“Well…” I didn't say that I pretty much knew it was him. For some reason, the poster didn't bother me that much. “Now you cut up my phone charger and punched my face.”

“Yes,” he said.

“What's next? Are you going to stab me or shoot me?” I asked. It was a serious question. I really wanted to know, so I could pull over, jump out, and run the hell away. (Not that I'd run away for real, just flag down the cops to get the necessary doctors to put Gus in a psych ward, I guess.)

“No. No, Felton,” Gus said. “I don't know why you couldn't have just waited at the car last night.”

“Because you were gone…”

“You're always going off somewhere. I just wanted to see a few songs and then come back out to tell you about how cool it all was, so you'd think I'm cool or whatever, and then take off in the damn car on our awesome trip, but you had to go and find a whole new set of friends in like two minutes, which…sucks. And then I waited for you for two hours in the car, which is what I always do—wait for you, man.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously,” Gus said. “I seriously cut up your phone charger with my pocket knife.”

“Ha-ha.” I wasn't really laughing.

“I don't know…” Gus trailed off.

“Seriously,” I said. “Are you going to try to kill me?”

“No. I want to visit Martin Luther King's grave. It's here in Atlanta.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes.”

“But you just punched me.”

“Yes.”

“Martin Luther King is about nonviolence.”

“I'm aware of that, Felton.”

Gus rolled down his window, and the hottest freaking air ever poured into the car. He lit a cigarette, then said, “I don't want to smoke. I want to be a good person.” He threw the cigarette out the window and rolled it back up.

“Smoking doesn't make you a bad person.”

“Not what I want. Do you mind if we stop at the grave?”

“I guess not,” I said. This is not something I was expecting, Aleah.

Using his magical iPhone, Gus figured out where the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site was and his birth house and grave site, and after some fairly craptastic traffic, we pulled off the interstate and got there in just about no time. All the MLK stuff is pretty much right off I-75 (the interstate that would take us all the way into Fort Myers in the south part of the Dangling Baggie).

Martin Luther King's grave is on this brick circle sitting in the middle of this cool blue pool. You can't walk right up and touch it or anything. It's weird to think Martin Luther King is in there. The real one, you know? Shot dead, Martin Luther King. A totally selfless person who gave up his life.

It's pretty sobering, you know? I sit around telling my brother he should be a pharmacist, while people are out there doing good until they get killed?

• • •

Shouldn't I be doing something for kids who get beat up? I have no idea what I'd do, Aleah, but here I am in the damn night with Zombie Renee. We're traveling through darkest Georgia. This is me. I can do things, you see? I can do different things with my time. I don't have to watch beach volleyball on TV. I don't have to sit on my ass with Jerri making snide comments about people on HGTV. Maybe.

• • •

It was too damn hot in that sun out at the grave, but Gus stood there letting all the rays beat down on him. He sweated so hard that drips started hanging off the end of his hair wad, which looked pretty funny. I might've mentioned this fact to him, but he was very serious and quiet. After awhile I said, “I've got to get some water, man.”

He nodded and handed me the keys. “I'll meet you in the parking lot in a few minutes.”

I didn't have to wait very long. Gus came stumbling out before I had even aired out the car from the ridiculous heat (doors all open). I handed him a bottle of water that I got at the gift shop.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You feeling better?”

“A little. You know I wrote like a twenty page paper on Martin Luther King in seventh grade?”

“Yeah. Vaguely remember.”

“I was totally set to try to be like him, to bring good shit into the world.”

“That's good. You still will, man.”

“Yeah, but I spend half my time chasing around a punk girl who thinks the height of awesome is drinking her mom's vodka, because all I really want to do…really, man, all I want to do is like put her in my mouth.”

“Maddie? In your mouth?”

“Yeah. And I spent like thirty hours making a nasty poster of you, and I punched your face and cut up your cord.”

“Yeah.”

“I don't really know what I'm doing, man.”

“Don't look at me. I have no idea what's going on ever.”

“Yeah, Felton. I know that.” Gus said. “I can't really blame you for anything, can I?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“You have a curse,” Gus said.

“I do?”

“Yeah. You have the curse of the monkey king.”

“What?”

“You stopped riding your bike to school with me. You don't come over for movie night anymore. You missed my birthday. You don't answer my texts.”

“Why did I stop doing all that?” I said pretty much to myself.

“I don't know,” Gus replied.

• • •

But, Aleah, I do know. Here I am thinking about it a month or so later, and I do. I really can be blamed for stuff. I don't have a curse. I'm just me, the damn center of my own head-stuck-in-my-bunghole universe. Narcissus, the mythical dude who all narcissists are named after, loved himself so damn much he couldn't stop staring at his own reflection in the water.

Sorry. I'm so sorry for everything to everybody.

It's good I'm on my way back down to pick up Andrew.

Eighty-one degrees. I'm serious. Renee and I just woke up because the bus was pulling into a bigger town and there are lights. We're in Jacksonville, Florida. Back in the Dangling Sack of America. It's like three in the morning, but it's eighty-one degrees according to the TV in the bus station.

I just ate some of the Hickory Farms Sausage and Cheese Gift Platter, damn it. I'm weak! I'm also hungry.

Thank God I showered at the hotel in Chicago yesterday, or Renee would be dead from my sweat, probably. She had her head on my shoulder and my face was asleep on top of her brown-hair head and we are both seriously spritzed, which was sort of embarrassing. (I might have drooled on her head a little.)

We're in the bus station because our bus doesn't go any farther. Our new bus to Tampa leaves in two hours. I was just thinking: since Jerri and me left Bluffton like forty-four hours ago, I've slept probably a total of six hours. That's crazy. That's all. I keep flinching because I'm seeing things in my peripheral vision. (Little people, mostly.)

Renee is in the bathroom. She told me to come find her if she hasn't come back in ten minutes because there are some pretty weird, random people hanging out here, Aleah.

Before she left, she also said, “You haven't asked a single question about me. Aren't you curious?”

I answered honestly: “I am so hung up in my own crap, I don't even think.”

“I'm starting my senior year at Gainesville in a few weeks.”

“I'm a senior too,” I said.

“Gainesville is the University of Florida, Felton. I'm twenty-two. I thought you were a lot older on the plane.”

“I'm a lot older since the plane,” I said.

“I do enjoy your peculiarity.”

Now I want to know why she was in Chicago, Aleah. Now I want to know her story. Now she's in the bathroom.

I'll probably forget to ask her anything when she gets back.

I've been hung up in my own crap my whole life, you know?

It's some pretty serious crap, though. I just don't know if that's a reasonable excuse anymore. Dad died a long, long time ago. Jerri's in good shape. I guess I don't know if Andrew's okay, but I think so.

• • •

Gus and I went through Gainesville. (I actually called Jerri from there to tell her we'd made it to Michigan all right. She was relieved, as she'd been calling my dead cell. She told me she was having a great time in Chicago—your dad makes Jerri happy, Aleah). The University of Florida has contacted me about football too. They've sent me a bunch of emails. This is who I am. A top recruit. I'm not that little, shivering kid anymore. I have to get over the horror movie.

Speaking of the horror movie: Gus and I arrived in Fort Myers in the middle of the night.

Before we got there, as Gus's Celica barreled silent through the Dangling dark, I began to realize that I'd never been so close to my dad's people, at least not since he died.

My dad grew up in Chicago, you know, but his parents already had a place down here when I was tiny. I didn't really know where it was in Florida, but I remembered it a little. As we rolled, I figured it had to be Fort Myers. (It was, indeed, I found out.) Gus and I were barreling straight into the heart of my dad's family, and this was not a place where me and Andrew were ever welcome.

Why were we listed in Rose Reinstein's obituary
, I wondered.

Talk about wanting to throw up, Aleah.

I thought,
How
is
this
better
than
a
damn
football
camp? You know how to play football. You can't talk to people who hate you, who go out of their way to show you they don't care, even though they should because they're your grandfather…

Around 2 a.m. Gus said, “Here's the exit.”

“Oh crap,” I said.

“Where do we need to go?” he asked.

“How should I know? I don't know.”

“Call Andrew. Get directions.”

Gus tossed his iPhone onto my lap and I tapped Andrew's number and I couldn't breathe at all. “Are you serious? He'll know we're here.”

“That's the point, Felton. We're here to keep him safe, to take him home if he's not safe. He has to know we're here.”

“Right,” I said. “Right. I know.”

I pressed
Call
. Why would he be awake? Two a.m. Andrew's voice mail picked up, his high-pitched canary voice singing, “Leave a Message! Leave a Message!” (My God, I used to hate his little canary voice…so annoying—of course, things have changed.)

I left a message: “Okay. Andrew. You're going to be pissed. But me and Gus are here—I don't mean at your orchestra camp, okay? We're seriously here in Fort Myers, and I need you to call me right back and tell me where to find you. Thank you.”

I hung up and shook my head. Half baked, you know, Aleah? What if Andrew never returned the call? He didn't have to if he didn't want to. Would I have to hunt down my grandfather myself? Would I call the Reinstein in the phone book? There probably wasn't even a listing. Not good.

“We didn't really think about this part, huh?” Gus mumbled.

Gus pulled off I-75 and aimed at downtown Fort Myers and “Beaches.” There were a lot of cars out on the road for two in the morning. Gus smoked, and heat poured in (like in the 80s in the middle of the night, like tonight).

“We need to find a spot to park. I can't drive anymore,” Gus said.

We drove through a wide and curving sprawl highway that went past shopping mall after shopping mall and restaurants and gas stations, and CVS pharmacies that were right across the street from Walgreens pharmacies, and gun shops and castle-themed miniature golf courses, and dark, empty retail spots that were sort of overgrown with Dangling foliage, but nothing that looked like any place specifically.

“There's no way we're going to find Andrew here,” I mumbled.

“Yeah, man. Yeah. We have a problem,” Gus nodded.

Finally, finally, after like a half hour of just sprawling crap (that looked exactly like the sprawling crap around Dubuque, Iowa, except with palm trees and thick shrubs), we pulled into a part of town that was older and sort of on a grid.

The giant palms bent over the car. Ranch-style houses sat back from the road in darkness. The houses got a little closer and older, but not like a hundred years old, more like from the seventies or something, and there were more and more old strip malls, and then a cemetery, and then we came to a sign that had an arrow pointing to downtown Fort Myers and one to the Midpoint Bridge and Cape Coral. Gus took a right to head toward downtown, because we couldn't leave Fort Myers.

But we never got to a downtown. About ten minutes later, Gus pulled into the empty parking lot of a closed restaurant that had thick bushes and trees all around it. He parked and shut off the car. We both stared into the dark.

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

“I can't drive anymore, man. I feel like I'm going to crash. We can hide in this overgrowth, man. We don't have any place to go, anyway. Try your freaking brother again.”

Andrew didn't answer, of course. “We don't know where we are, Andrew…”

“McGregor Boulevard,” Gus said.

“McGregor Boulevard…”

“In Fort Myers,” Gus said.

“In Fort Myers, Andrew.”

“Edison Restaurant, right next to the country club.”

“Edison Restaurant. The country club. My phone's dead. Call Gus, okay?”

Andrew didn't call. We sat in silence for another ten minutes.

“I'm going to sleep now,” Gus said.

Gus stuck his hand next to the seat and pulled a lever, and the shitty Celica chair fell backward and then he was out cold, I thought.

I breathed hard. My nerves sort of leapt. I didn't want to meet my grandfather, Aleah. I also didn't want to be stuck in a parking lot in the middle of the night in the middle of Florida where criminals might be hiding. (I've seen a lot of episodes of
COPS
.) I heard tree-creaking noises and cars driving past the entrance slowly. My muscles filled with juice. Had to do it. I got out of the car and pissed in a bush, and then I ran back and forth and back and forth across the parking lot like the total freak-show clown that I am.

After awhile, Gus rolled down his window and shouted, “Would you stop? You're like a freaking hamster on one of those wheels.”

“This is what I do,” I shouted.

“Freak, Felton. Wow,” Gus said.

I ran back and forth until I could barely stand.
What
the
hell? Where's Andrew? Why am I here? I don't want to see my grandpa. I don't care about Tovi. This is stupid. Why aren't I in Michigan? Jesus Christ. Jerri? I'm sorry. Why am I here?
It took probably two hours, seriously. When I climbed back in the car, Gus was really asleep.

It was so freaking dark, and those thick palm tree bushes were bent over the car blocking out everything…

• • •

Wait.

Renee's not back, yet. It's been like twenty minutes. Should I really go find her? In the bathroom? Some more people just showed up. Like ten middle-aged African Americans. They're all wearing Hawaiian shirts like Andrew wears. They all look like they're going to fall asleep. I'm so tired too. There's one dude working the ticket window, and he's so tired he might not make it through the next couple of minutes.

Where the hell is Renee? I'm passing out. I have to unplug my computer and pack up if I'm going to find her.