The Big Crunch (2 page)

“What?” said a voice in her ear.

June turned her head to look at the boy sitting next to her. He had a broad face, glasses with gold frames, and short dark hair combed straight forward in raggedy bangs.

“Excuse me?” said June.

“You said something,” said the boy.

“No, I didn’t.”

The boy shrugged. “I thought I heard you say something.”

“I was just clearing my throat.”

“It sounded like you said, ‘I have no soap.’ ”

“Ahem!” The teacher, Mr. Hallstrom, was glaring at them. “I hate to interrupt, but we have a class going on here, and we would all appreciate it if you two lovebirds would shut up and listen.”

The boy’s cheeks turned instantly red.

June said, simply, “Sorry.”

Mr. Hallstrom harrumphed, then went back to talking about how to measure the height of a tree based on the length of its shadow and other trig stuff June already knew. She sneaked a look at the boy next to her. He was taking notes, pressing his pen hard against his notebook, his blush still in evidence. June never blushed — more evidence that she had the emotional depth of a gnat, according to Sarcastic June. This boy obviously had strong emotions. She imagined herself riding in a car with him. Would he have a car? He didn’t look like a boy who would have his own car.

Later, in the hallway, at her locker, he came up to her and said, “Sorry I got you in trouble back there.”

“It’s okay,” June replied.

He held out his hand. “Jerry Preuss, future class president.”

June wasn’t sure which was dorkier — the handshake offer or the “class president” bit. She didn’t know what else to do, so she shook his hand.

“I’m June Edberg.”

“June — like the month?”

“It’s kind of an old-fashioned name,” June said. “I’m lucky they didn’t name me February.”

It was a dumb joke she’d used a hundred times before. Jerry gave her a blank look for a second, then he got it and laughed.

“Did you just move here?” he asked.

“A few weeks ago. I used to live in Chicago.”

“My cousin lives in Chicago.”

June smiled but didn’t say anything.

After a few seconds, she could see the red returning to his cheeks, and felt sorry for him.

“Are you really running for class president?”

“Yeah. I’m just starting to campaign.”

June held back a laugh. “That’s pretty ambitious.”

“I know. So … what would it take to get your vote?”

“Five bucks.”

It took him a couple of beats to see she was kidding, and then he was embarrassed for not getting it right away. “Seriously,” he said.

“Seriously?”

“I’m trying to figure out how to get people to vote for me.”

“Don’t most politicians just promise people whatever they want?” She laughed — it sounded totally phony. “How about a four-day school week?”

Jerry Preuss’s soft brown eyes glistened. He nodded vigorously, as if she’d said something insanely brilliant, and shifted his feet to bring him a few inches closer, so close she could see the pores on his nose.

“That’s good!” he said. “Anything else?”

June, her back pressed against her locker, wanted to scream.

“I gotta go,” she said. “Good luck with your campaign.” She slipped past him and walked quickly off down the hall.

It was not that she was afraid of him. Jerry wasn’t repulsive or anything. He seemed like a nice guy. But she sensed yet another manacle about to clamp on to her. Another dragging chain. Another attachment she would eventually have to tear away.

Every time, it hurt.

T
HE FIRST TIME
W
ES HEARD
J
UNE
E
DBERG
’
S NAME
, he didn’t connect it with Aqua Girl.

“There’s this girl June, in my trig class? She talks to herself,” Jerry Preuss said. Jerry was Wes’s oldest friend.

“What does she say?” Wes asked.

“ ‘I have no soap.’ ”

“What does that mean?”

“She’s from Chicago.”

“They don’t have soap in Chicago?”

They were standing outside where the buses were loading, waiting until the last minute to get on. The less time spent in a school bus the better.

“I need a car,” Jerry said.

“Everybody needs a car.”

“I need money to get a car. My parents won’t buy me one.”

“Join the club.” Wes needed a car too, but his summer job at the nursery had only netted him nine hundred dollars after expenses, and a lot of that he’d spent on junk. What was left was hardly enough for gas and insurance. He’d been thinking about getting a used scooter. If he could talk his mom into it.

“How come you broke up with Izzy?” Jerry asked.

“She was being too needy.” It was a lie. Izzy was one of the least needy people he’d ever known. He didn’t actually know
why they’d broken up. It wasn’t as if they’d had a fight, or even stopped liking each other. He’d just gotten …
tired.
It was exhausting, knowing Isabel O’Connor was always there, knowing his phone could ring at any moment and it would be her, and knowing that anything he did would be a thing she would have to think was okay or else it would become this thing he had to hide and feel guilty about, and knowing that all his friends thought of him not as Wes, but as Wes-and-Iz, Iz-and-Wes, and most of all knowing that she existed, that she was out there thinking about him. Everything he did and everything she did was tied together in a big snarly knot with a thousand invisible strands.

He had tried talking to Izzy about it once, the invisible strand thing, but she started laughing so he shut up about it. It was just a way to think about things.

“Besides,” he said to Jerry, “I don’t really want a girlfriend at this stage of my life.”

“What stage is that?” Jerry asked.

Wes shrugged. “You know. Junior year.”

The weird thing was that breaking up had been Wes’s idea, and it had taken him
weeks
to build up the courage to break it to her, and then when he told Izzy, she’d been like,
Yeah, whatever, cool.
He was immediately sure that if he hadn’t suggested the breakup, she would have, so the feeling of freedom he’d been looking forward to turned into a sick feeling, like
Now what?
Now that he didn’t have Izzy anymore, some supposedly useless little part of him had left a hole that was filling up with this stuff, a little bag of grit sitting in his gut. So instead of invisible strands he had a sack of dirt riding on his liver.

“Wes!” Jerry was suddenly twenty feet away, standing at the bus door. “You getting on?”

Wes looked at the long, yellow-orange bus, at the blurry faces behind the dirty windows, and suddenly he had this flash that if he got on, everybody on the bus would attach to him with a new invisible strand. A fly caught in a spiderweb.

“I’m gonna walk,” he said.

Jerry shrugged and climbed aboard. The bus doors closed.

June’s parents had rented a house eleven blocks away from Wellstone High. Her mother had presented this information to her as if it were a gift.

“I know you hated that long bus ride in Schaumburg, so we found this place close to your new school.”

June knew that her convenience had nothing to do with why her parents had chosen this house. The fact that it was near school was purely coincidental, but her mother, typically, had taken credit for supposedly making sacrifices to enhance her poor, pathetic daughter’s life.

“You can walk to school in five minutes,” her mother had said.

More like ten,
June thought. “What about in winter? When it’s, like, twenty below? I’ll freeze.”

“It doesn’t get
that
cold here.”

“We’re in Minnesota, aren’t we? Icebox of the nation?” Not that what she said could have changed anything.

She had timed herself on the way to school that morning. Eleven minutes, thirty-four seconds. If they were still living here in January — no sure thing — eleven minutes, thirty-four seconds was enough time to book a serious frostbite.

She decided to time herself again on the way home. Maybe she could cut her time down to ten minutes if she walked faster and cut a few corners.

Unfortunately, Naomi Liddell latched on to her as she was leaving the school and yakked her ears raw with something about the school paper. June didn’t know what Naomi was going on about, except that she seemed intent on getting June involved in some sort of after-school activity involving sticking address labels on envelopes. June finally extricated herself by saying she had a dentist appointment, which she didn’t.

“Which dentist do you see?” Naomi asked.

“Um, I don’t know.” That was the problem with lies. They got complicated. “My mom made the appointment.”

“I bet it’s Posnick. He’s nice.”

“I’ll let you know,” June said, edging away. She checked the time on her cell phone. “I gotta go.” She started walking fast.

“See you tomorrow!” Naomi called after her.

June put Naomi out of her mind and gave herself to the rhythm of her heels scuffing the sidewalk. About halfway home she saw a boy ahead of her going in the same direction but walking much more slowly. As she drew closer she noticed his hair — pale brown, kind of on the long side — and his shirt — plaid, unbuttoned, tails flapping in the light breeze. Faded black jeans. Dirty white basketball shoes. He was shuffling along, in no hurry, but every few steps he would sort of skip, or maybe he was kicking something.

He was kicking a rock, moving it down the sidewalk in front of him.

June slowed down when she got about twenty paces behind
him. She didn’t want to startle him and throw him off his rhythm. He had probably been kicking that same rock for blocks.

On the other hand, she was making good time, and she hated that this guy was holding her up. She sped up her pace and walked past him, staying out of the way of the rock by walking on the grassy strip between the sidewalk and the street. As they came next to each other, she glanced over at him and their eyes met. He kicked the rock too hard; it bounced up onto somebody’s lawn. June gave him a flat smile and kept walking, but the image of his face stayed with her, those startled brown eyes, that open mouth. He reminded her of other boys she’d met, but there was also something different. Something about those eyes, the way he looked at her.

Aqua Girl walked really fast. Wes tried to match her speed, but he couldn’t do it without sort of half running. He gave up after a few seconds; the gap between them widened.

He kept following her even after passing Fourteenth Street, the street that led, after another mile of nearly identical houses, to the nearly identical house where he lived.

The girl kept up her rapid pace for several blocks, then turned a corner.

Wes, a block behind her, sped up until he was almost to the corner, then returned to his nonchalant shuffle. He stopped at the corner. She was nowhere in sight. She must live in one of the houses near the corner. Not that it mattered. He didn’t even know why he’d followed her. Just something to do. Stupid. He’d added half a mile to his long walk home.

He thought about taking the shortcut across Jenkins Park, then decided against it. Izzy lived right on the park. It would be too weird to run into her.

For nearly eighteen months — an eternity — Izzy O’Connor and Wes Andrews had been monogamous, a constant part of each other’s life. They had talked two or three times every day. Wes had been a regular dinner guest at the O’Connors’. He called Izzy’s mom Mrs. O’C, and he called her dad by his nickname, Hap.

Izzy had spent plenty of time at Wes’s house too, most often when Wes was drafted into babysitting his sister, Paula, who had recently turned ten and declared herself too old to need a sitter.

He had only seen Izzy once at school that first day, sitting in the lunchroom with her artsy friends. They were laughing and making things out of straws. That was the sort of thing she liked to do. Always bending and twisting and coloring things to make them look like other things.

People were always saying what a pretty girl Izzy was, and it was true. Though over the past year her face had become so much a part of Wes’s life that seeing her was almost like seeing his own face in a mirror. Except that at lunch that day — the first time he’d seen her since they’d broken up two weeks ago — her hair had been shorter.

At Sixteenth Street, Wes caught a whiff of something baking. Something sweet. He turned left and followed his nose to the Bun & Brew.

The Bun & Brew — “brew” as in coffee, not beer — had taken over an old filling station, still with the antique pumps out front, forty-nine cents a gallon for regular. They didn’t work, of course.
Inside, the nostalgia theme intensified: photos of old cars, Formica tabletops, and a working eight-track tape deck constantly playing oldies so moldy they were actually semi-cool. The tables were set up in the old garage bay; the office had been converted into an espresso bar and baked-goods case. A muffin would kill the stomach clench, and it wouldn’t take his every last dime. He shuffled up to the counter. Eight types of muffins, three varieties of croissant, a killer chocolate éclair, and some giant chocolate chip cookies. He always ordered the blueberry muffin.

“Can I help you?”

Wes looked up. On the other side of the counter stood Izzy, her face carefully arranged in that tight half smile she used with complete strangers.

His heart did a
ka-thunk.

“Iz … you work here now?”

Izzy nodded, still holding the smile.

“Cool,” said Wes. A really stupid thing to say because it was not cool at all, her working there, where if he wanted a blueberry muffin, he would have to see her all the time.

“Blueberry muffin?” she asked.

“Cookie,” he said, not wanting to be too predictable.

Izzy grabbed a tissue and got him a cookie.

“How’s Paulalicious?” she asked. That was her nickname for his sister. Izzy had a nickname for everybody. She’d come up with some really weird ones for him. Like Pookie.

“She thinks she’s an adult already. Two digits.”

“Oh, right — her tenth birthday. Tell her happy birthday for me.”