Highly Illogical Behavior(15)

“You sound like Clark.”

“I guess that’s your boyfriend?” he asked.

“Yeah. Been together a while now.”

“I didn’t think I could remind anyone of anyone.”

Lisa laughed and shook her head. “It’s a compliment, of course.”

“What’s he like? I’m betting he doesn’t have a holodeck.”

“Well, he’s a water polo player. Smart but not a know-it-all. His mom’s a nightmare, but his dad’s cool. They’re divorced. He’s tall, but just a little shorter than you, I think. The season just ended and he’s depressed about it or something because he’s been, like, flaking a lot lately . . . with everyone but me. I tried talking to him about it, but he doesn’t like to get too serious. It’s a problem, really, but I’m working on it.”

“Okay . . . that was a lot of information on Clark. Got it.”

“Also, he hides his comic books under his bed when his friends come over. How stupid is that?”

Lisa clicked around on her phone and handed it to him. It was a picture of her and Clark, in formal wear, taken at some school dance or something.

“Tell me why someone who looks like that would ever be embarrassed of anything.”

“No clue,” Solomon said quickly, barely glancing at the screen. “Looks like the king of high school to me. I’d die there, wouldn’t I?”

“You watch too much TV,” she said. “High school isn’t what you think it is.”

“Isn’t it a little, though? He hides his comics.”

“So, maybe a little,” she said. “But you’d be okay at it, I bet.”

“Is there a fountain?” he asked with a half-serious expression.

“You’re very different from what I expected, Solomon Reed.”

“I hope that’s a good thing.”

“Absolutely.”

He was glad she didn’t stay too much longer because, despite having had a good time, all that talking and trying to come up with new things to say or questions to ask was making his head hurt. Then, as soon as he shut the door behind her, he started to feel like he couldn’t catch his breath. He leaned against the wall for a second, trying to breathe through it, hoping he could shake it off. But he couldn’t. Now hyperventilating, he stumbled down the hallway and into his bedroom, where he crawled under the covers and rode it out, his body shaking from side to side, his eyes closed so tightly they were starting to hurt. It was brief but intense, and afterward Solomon just lay there listening to his breath as it leveled out. Sometimes that’s all you can do when it happens—hold on just long enough for the world to stop shaking. There’s a reason people mistake them for heart attacks and every time it happened to Solomon, a little part of him wondered if maybe his chest would explode. Other times, he wondered if that would make it all better.

“So . . . how’d it go?” his mom asked when she got home from work.

“Good,” he answered. “She’s nice.”

“Solomon,” she said sternly, “use your words. It’s all I could think about today. I should’ve just stayed home. How you talked us into leaving you alone for this, I will never . . .”

“Sorry,” he interrupted. “Yeah . . . she came over and I showed her around. We just talked a little. No biggie, Mom.”

“Did you show her the garage?”

“Maybe.”

“That may be something you want to ease your friends into.”

“Friends? Mom, don’t blow this out of proportion. Who knows if I’ll ever even see her again?”

“I don’t care about that,” she said. “What’s important is whether or not you want to see her again.”

Solomon thought about that for the rest of the night. He’d already given his parents so much more hope than they’d had in a long time just by seeing Lisa. So now he had two choices: He could refuse to see her again and break their hearts, or he could keep going along with this whole friend thing and see what would happen.

? ? ?

The next morning, he woke up to what he thought was the world ending. He’d imagined it before—watching from his window as flames fell from the sky with the news on loud in the background and neighbors screaming, maybe even his parents running into the room to hug him one last time. But he’d never imagined it to be quite so loud, with a roaring coming from all directions. Maybe it was an earthquake, he decided, jumping out of bed and running over to stand in the doorway. He waited there for a minute, the adrenaline waking him up with every nervous blink of his eyes, and eventually realized that the house wasn’t even shaking.

He ran out to the living room and before he could even get to the sliding glass doors leading to the backyard, he could see what was going on. There was a bulldozer digging a very large hole behind his house.

“No way,” he said aloud.

There was no going back now, was there? He had very few surprises in his life and this one hit him hard. He took a seat on the edge of the couch and leaned forward, letting his head hang between his legs. He covered his ears and closed his eyes and let himself sway a little on the balls of his feet. Maybe there wasn’t an earthquake, but the world still vibrated and shook all around him. His thoughts stabbed him like knives and suddenly his shoulders were so heavy he could hardly keep from falling all the way down to the floor. He gasped for air, his lungs never getting full enough to satisfy him. If someone had been home, they would’ve heard it, the sound of someone suffocating on his own breath. It sounded like he was dying, and it felt that way, too.