Holding Up the Universe(51)

Dusty.

“Not in a flu kind of way.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“I’m good.” He wanders over to me, sorting through the parts that are scattered across the worktable and the floor. I say, “Do you want to talk about anything? Are people still being shitty?”

“I’m good too. I’m Peter Pan.”

And I get it. He wants to stay in this moment. The bad moments always have a way of coming around again, way too soon.

I go up to my room and climb out of my window, into the tree and onto the roof. I lie back and stare at the sky. I think about it being the same sky that I looked up at when I was six, before I fell, and about all that’s happened in between then and now. It really shouldn’t be the same sky, for all that’s happened. It should look completely different.

Marcus was playing in the yard. I went up to the roof to get away from him and away from my mom, who was always telling me to watch him. It was harder to get up there than I expected. That surprised me. And it was dirtier—bird shit and twigs and an old softball that might have been there for the past twenty years. Our roof isn’t flat—it has a slope—and I scooted to the edge of it, looking out over the street and the neighborhood. I held on with one hand, and Marcus looked up just then, and I let go because I wanted him to see that I was strong and fearless and bigger than he would ever be.

It takes less than a second to fall twelve feet, but it felt like it lasted forever. In that moment of falling, they say the memory goes wide open. You can see things you don’t usually think of or see or remember. For me, it was my mother’s face—specifically, it was her eyes. I can’t remember what they looked like in that moment I saw them, but I remember that I saw them.





“Hello?”

“It’s Jack. I was thinking about what you said.”

“I say so many things. Can you narrow it down?”

“I was thinking about what you said about doing something to address this whole you-like-me-I-like-you situation.”

“I never said I like you.”

Silence.

“Jack?”

“What you’ve just heard is the sound of my heart dying a swift and sudden death.”

“Hypothetically speaking, if—and I’m not saying I do—but if I was to like you, what would you want to do about it?”

“I would probably want to hold your hand.”

“Probably?”

“Hypothetically, yes. I would definitely hypothetically want to hold your hand.”

“Well then, I would probably hypothetically hold yours back.”

“I would also hypothetically want to take you to a movie, even though I don’t like movies as a rule because of the whole facial confusion situation.”

“Which one?”

“Which movie?”

“I need to know if it’s something I want to see.”

“Won’t it be enough just to be with me, holding hypothetical hands in the dark?”

“I’d at least like to know what kind of movie we’d be seeing.”

“Uh. I think it would need to be a movie with some of everything. Comedy. Drama. Action. Mystery. Romance.”

“That sounds like a really good movie.”

“So would you hold my hand during it?”

“Probably.”

“Okay. I’ll take ‘probably’ for now. I’d also want to take you out to dinner, either before or after the movie, depending, and I would absolutely want to walk you to your door.”

“What if I wanted to dance to my door instead?”

“Then I’m your man.”

Are you? Is this what this means? My heart goes hopscotching out of the room and down the hall and out the door and into the street.

“But after I danced you to the door, I’d want to kiss you.”

“You would?”

“I would.”

And now my heart is nowhere on earth to be found. I can see it as it bypasses the moon and the stars and goes blasting into another galaxy.

“Hypothetically.”

“Well then, I would let you kiss me.”

“Hypothetically?”

“No. Definitely.”

By the time we hang up two hours later, it’s 1:46 a.m. I lie there for the rest of the night waiting for my heart to return to my chest.





THE NEXT EIGHT DAYS




* * *





At lunch on Monday, I sit across the table from Kam and Seth, who are elbow to elbow. I’m sketching design ideas for Dusty’s robot, and I’m pretty much on fire for the first time, and I can see it, as in I finally know what I’m doing, and my blood is pumping and my heart is pumping like I’ve just run a marathon and sprinted all the way to the finish. Nothing, as in nothing, can stop the flow of these ideas, until Seth goes, “You know, Kam and me, we’ve got something that can help you out in your situation.”

I look up, a little foggy, because my head is on the paper in front of me, not in the MVB cafeteria. Seth is grinning like a jackal, and whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it.

But I say, wary as hell, “What situation is that?”

Seth elbows Kam hard, which makes Kam drop the three dozen french fries he was about to stuff down his throat. “Goddammit, Powell.”