The Big Crunch (13 page)

But on the morning of New Year’s Day, Paula walked into the living room and found her brother lying on his stomach on the
carpet playing with her new game, making designs out of the colored tiles and little men. She almost choked with indignation.

“Who said you could play with my game?!”

Wes looked up and grinned. “Nobody.”

“Well, you can’t!” she said.

“You don’t want to play?”

“You said you didn’t want to. You said it was stupid.”

“I didn’t mean it,” Wes said.

Paula stared at him.

“Do you want to play or not?” he said.

“I have to eat breakfast.”

“So eat your cereal in here.”

“We’re not supposed to.”

“Mom’s at aerobics, and Dad went to play racquetball. I won’t tell, if you promise not to spill.”

Paula could find no fault with Wes’s offer, and a few minutes later she was sprawled on the floor with a bowl of Froot Loops, explaining the rules of the game. Wes pretended not to understand even the simplest instructions, forcing Paula to explain things over and over, which delighted her, even though she knew he was just acting stupid to tease her. They were just getting started playing a real game when the phone rang.

“I bet it’s your secret girlfriend,” Paula said.

Wes jumped up and checked the number on the kitchen phone. It was June. As he lifted the receiver, Paula shrieked, “Hi, Wes’s Secret Girlfriend!”

Wes just laughed and closed the kitchen door and leaned back on it.

“Hey,” he said into the phone. He listened, sliding slowly down the door until he was sitting on the floor. After a few more seconds, June stopped talking.

She said, “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

Omaha. Three hundred fifty miles away. She might as well be moving to Neptune. In two weeks she would be moving to Neptune.

Sani-Made, after all their talk about hiring her dad permanently, had decided not to renew his contract. In fact, they had fired him. On New Year’s Eve, just as he was leaving work.

It wasn’t the first time her dad had been let go suddenly. In the workout business, getting axed was almost normal. The company owners let him come in and do the dirty work, and then turned around and did the same thing to him.

Her dad shrugged it off.
“Next!”
He’d accepted the Omaha job twenty minutes after getting fired by Sani-Made. In fact, he was driving down the next day, leaving the task of packing up and moving to June and her mother.

“Omaha-Benford Bank has a house for us,” he said. “One of their foreclosures. It’s in a nice neighborhood. You’ll like it.”

Like
it? They’d never lived anyplace long enough for her to like it. June knew better than to argue. Her father’s business migrations were a force of nature — the universe conspiring to seek out every scintilla of happiness inside her and rip it out, bloody roots and all, and turn her life to a stinking pile of crap. That was what it was about. He could have gone on to his new job all by himself, let her and her mom stay in Minnesota until the end of the school year, at
least — but no, he had to have the family together, as if a few months apart would somehow damage them. Damage? How could they be any more damaged than they were already?

Still, that was what scared her, what kept her in line. If she threw a screaming fit and refused to leave, what would happen? Would her family shatter? Sometimes it felt that way — one wrong move and everything would fly apart.

She spent most of the day in her bedroom making piles of stuff. Stuff to keep, stuff to give away, stuff to throw away, stuff she hadn’t decided about. The throwaway pile was biggest. It included all her schoolwork, clothes from last summer, old magazines, empty and almost empty makeup containers. The downstairs phone rang. June stopped what she was doing and listened. She heard her mom’s voice, a short conversation that she couldn’t quite make out, then her mom coming up the stairs. She concentrated on making a perfect stack of folded T-shirts. Her mom looked in through her bedroom doorway.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Making piles,” said June.

Her mom sat down on the bed. “That was Wesley again,” she said.

“I thought it might be,” June said. She had turned her cell off after talking to Wes that morning.

“I told him you weren’t feeling well, and that you couldn’t talk to him.”

June nodded.

“I’m sorry. He seems like a nice young man.”

“He is.” June spoke in a voice so small she could hardly hear herself.

S
CHOOL STARTED AGAIN THE NEXT DAY.
June was absent. Wes ran into Jerry Preuss after English class.

“Hey,” Wes said cautiously.

Jerry nodded, his expression giving nothing away.

Wes said, “How are you doing?”

“I’m great,” said Jerry.

“That was some crazy party,” Wes said. When Jerry gave him a blank look, he added, “At Alan’s? Alan Hurd?”

“Oh,” said Jerry. “I don’t remember much.”

“I heard the cops broke it up early.”

“Did they?” Jerry said.

“I think so.” Wes wondered if Jerry really didn’t remember, or if he was just pretending not to because he was embarrassed. It didn’t really matter.

Wes said, “The Edbergs are moving.”

“I know,” Jerry said.

“You know?”

“She called me last night.”

“She did? You talked to her?”

“I just said I did,” Jerry said, half smiling, a flicker of surprise — and triumph — in his eyes. “They’re going to Omaha. So what?”

“So nothing.” Wes walked away, feeling more than a little sick inside.

It didn’t take much for June to convince her mom that there was no point in her going back to school for one short week.

“If I stay home, I can help you with the packing,” she said. “If I go to school now, we’ll just start a bunch of stuff that I’ll never be able to finish. Besides, I think it’s best to just move on. You know.
Next!
”

Her mom laughed at that. “You’ve got more of your father in you than I thought,” she said.

June went to work on her father’s closet, packing his suits and jackets and shirts and trousers in cardboard wardrobe boxes left over from their last move. All of his suits were either navy blue or gray.
People who wear brown and green suits are perceived as untrustworthy,
he had once told her. Another one of her dad’s peculiar notions.

June didn’t think she was like her dad at all. But some of his ideas were hard to argue with. For example, there really
was
no reverse gear — she couldn’t go back and have New Year’s Eve over and over again.

How could something so inevitable be so hard? She wished she could close her eyes, turn around three times, and be there. Wherever. Not here.

Poor Wes. She felt awful for him, she really did, but she was doing him a favor really, just chopping it off, ending it, avoiding that long, awkward, painful good-bye. She should have stuck with Jerry. It was easy to say good-bye to Jerry.
Good-bye, Jerry. Have a nice life. Good luck with your political ambitions. I hope nobody at that party YouTubed you.

So easy.

But not Wes. Thinking about not seeing him was unbearable, but not as unbearable as thinking about seeing him again, and then having to let go. Three hundred fifty miles. It wasn’t really as far as Neptune. They could bridge the distance, texting and talking and sending pictures back and forth … but it would be only a matter of months before her dad took a job in Alaska or Alabama, or Wes would meet somebody else, or go back to that girl Izzy.

June squeezed one more sport coat into the wardrobe box. She used a fat blue marker to write
Dad’s Closet
on the side and taped it up. She had done this before. All of her father’s stuff would fit in seven boxes, three big and four medium. June could fit her stuff in one big box, two medium, and three small. Her life: one big, two medium, three small. There was no point in accumulating stuff if you had to move every few months. No point in accumulating anything. Friends, for example.

June went to her bedroom, back to her piles. One pile was socks. She sat down and started pairing them up. Because if she was missing one sock, there was no point in moving its mate to Omaha.

Wes would laugh at that. Or he would say, “Yeah, but what if later on you find the missing sock in a pant leg or folded up in a towel or something? Then you’d wish you still had the one you threw away.” Or maybe he would say, “What’s the deal with matching socks? Who says they have to match? Wouldn’t the world be more interesting if people wore a different sock on each foot?” Or he might say, “You shouldn’t throw it away. You should donate it to the One-legged League.” And she would say, “Or the One-footed Family.” And he would stick his hand in the sock like it was a puppet and say, “No! No! Pleeeeeease don’t throw me away!” They would laugh.

Where was she getting this stuff? Anyway, it was a miracle: She wasn’t missing any socks.

Next?

Her cell rang. She checked the number; it was Wes. She let it go to voice mail, jammed the paired socks into a shoe box, and put the shoe box in a moving carton. She dialed her voice mail and listened to his message. Same as before. He wanted to talk to her. He didn’t get it. He didn’t get that there was no point. That it was over. That it had never started, not really. She felt herself getting angry, and went with it. Anger was cleansing; it felt good to get mad. She thumbed an angry text into her phone and sent it quick, before she could change her mind.

Wes read the message over and over, like touching a sore.

Maybe her parents had forced her to write the message. Maybe they’d written it themselves. Maybe she was being held prisoner, or she was drugged. Because it was impossible that she didn’t want to see him. It was too cruel, too insane, too … impossible.

But he knew it was true.

W
ES STOOD OUTSIDE
J
UNE’S HOUSE
for what seemed like an hour, though it was probably more like ten minutes. She was in there; he could feel her presence.

He thought through the likely scenarios. June would answer the door. Or her mother. Or Mr. Edberg. Or no one would answer the door. Every one of those possibilities frightened him. He might have stood there longer, but the cold was getting to him; he walked up the unshoveled walk to the front door and rang the bell.

Mrs. Edberg opened the door and gave him this pitying look that made him want to shrivel and die.

“Wesley,” she said with a sad smile.

“I really need to talk to June,” Wes said. He knew he sounded pathetic.

Mrs. Edberg was shaking her head. “She can’t see you right now. She’s … busy.”

“I won’t stay long,” Wes said. “I just need to see her.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I tried calling.”

Mrs. Edberg nodded as he spoke. “I’m sure she got your messages. But this is not a good time.”

“When would be a good time?”

Mrs. Edberg sighed. “I’m sorry, Wesley. I’m going to have to ask you to leave now.”

“I’m not leaving,” Wes said. “I’ll wait here until she comes out to talk to me.”

Mrs. Edberg’s expression went from pitying to hard. “I’m afraid you’ll have a very long wait.” She closed the door.

Wes didn’t know what to do. He could hardly believe he had said what he’d said. Refusing to leave. June clearly wanted nothing to do with him. But maybe she did, or at least if he had a chance to talk to her he could find out why she wouldn’t talk to him, why she was being so mean. He kicked the snow away from the top step and sat down, his back to the door. He would sit there until June came out, or the police hauled him away, or until his butt froze to the step.

Looking out her bedroom window, June could see Wes’s feet sticking out. He was just sitting there on the steps. She hoped he was wearing dry socks — it was cold out. She wished he would leave, but at the same time she loved that he wouldn’t.

“Junie?” Her mother was standing in the bedroom doorway. “Are you going to let that poor boy sit out there all afternoon?”

June looked at her mother. “I’m just doing what you always say. Ending it. Not looking back.”

“Go talk to him,” her mother said.

“I already texted him that I didn’t want to see him anymore.”

“He needs to hear it from the real you.”

When Wes heard the door open behind him, his entire body went rigid. He knew without looking that it was June. She sat down next to him. He kept his eyes on the street.

She didn’t say anything, and after a while he turned his head, his neck bones grinding like a rusty hinge. June was wearing slippers, jeans, an enormous down jacket, and that pink cap with the long tassel. The tassel was clean. Her hands were buried in the jacket pockets. The only part of her he could see was her face from her eyebrows down to her chin. He stared hard, trying to memorize every surface, every pore, the texture of her lips, the color of her eyes. She wasn’t wearing her contacts. He liked the natural color of her irises better — the pale blue, not the swimming pool aqua.

Her face was very still, as if she was asleep with her eyes open, yet still excruciatingly aware. He knew she could feel his eyes on her face. It was almost like touching her. No, it was
exactly
like touching her. He could feel his heart pumping. He could feel his skin. He could smell her, that clean, sweet smell — what had he thought before? Maple syrup and fresh-turned earth? That was not quite right. Not even close. More like pine trees and burnt sugar. And it wasn’t an actual smell, not really, but the things that came into his head when he was near her.

“Stop it,” she said.

“Stop what?”

“Stop looking at me.”

Wes looked away, closed his eyes, and examined the fresh memory of her face.

She said, “Look, I’m sorry about that message I sent.”

She said, “I just have to go on with my sucky life.”

She said, “And not look back.”

She said, “You know?”