The Big Crunch (4 page)

J
UNE ONCE AGAIN FOUND HERSELF
catching up with the floppy-haired guy from her language arts class. Only this time he wasn’t kicking a rock, he was just sort of shambling along with his hands in his pockets, head tipped forward like he was watching the sidewalk. She was sure he was the guy that Jess and Phoebe had been talking about, the one who used to go out with that girl Izzy.

He was walking oddly again, the sort of shuffle with an occasional hop thrown in. June focused on his feet and quickly figured out that he was trying not to step on the cracks. Another guy with a case of arrested development.

June slowed down and followed him at a distance of about fifty feet. Not so close that he would hear her and turn around. They proceeded for about a block that way, two rogue planets following the same path, until the guy suddenly stopped, looked straight down, and bent over to tie his shoe. Either she would have to catch up with him or stop completely. She kept walking. A few seconds later, just as he stood up, she came up alongside him.

He looked at her and jerked back his head, as if he found her somewhat repellent.

June stopped and said, “What?”

“Nothing!” he said. “You just … I didn’t know you were there.”

“It’s a public sidewalk, right?”

“Yeah! I didn’t mean, uh … you’re in Ms. Blum’s class, right? First period?”

June nodded, watching his face. His brown eyes moved in little jerks from her mouth to her eyes to her hair. His eyebrows were slightly crooked, as if he was on the verge of asking a question.

“My name’s Wes,” he said.

“I’m June.”

“Cool.”

Cool?
Why would he think her name was
cool?

“I think I was named after my grandmother,” June said. “I’m just glad her name wasn’t February.”

He laughed, even though she’d kind of screwed up the joke, which wasn’t much of a joke to begin with.

“Grandma February,” Wes said. “I have a Grandma May, short for Mavis.”

“And they didn’t name you Mavis?”

“No, but my middle name is August.”

They stared at each other. June thought he was kidding, but she wasn’t a hundred percent sure.

“You live around here?” he asked after a moment.

June hesitated before responding. Her instinct was to never share personal information unnecessarily, but he had, after all, told her his middle name. She waved her hand in the direction they had been walking.

Wes nodded, as if that was all he wanted to know. “I live on Fourteenth,” he said.

There was an awkward moment then when neither of them said anything and they were just standing there on the sidewalk. After about three amazingly long seconds, June said, “Oh,
Fourteenth,” which was a pretty lame thing to say, but it was all she could think of at the moment.

The thing that really got Wes was how far apart her eyes were. It made him feel as if she were looking at him from two different directions. Not that they were freakish or anything. And if the average person’s eyes were, say, an inch and a quarter apart, June’s were maybe an inch and a quarter plus a sixteenth — just the tiniest bit more. They were impossible to not look at — big, almond-shaped, the color of a clean swimming pool on a sunny day. Wes had to make a conscious effort to move his eyes around so she wouldn’t think they were in a staring contest. He looked from her wide mouth to her little nose with three freckles to the tiny V-shaped scar on her chin.

Almost at the same moment, even though neither of them had said anything, they both started walking.

Wes said, “You just move here?”

“A few weeks ago,” she said. “From Chicago.”

“I’ve never been.”

“Schaumburg, actually. It’s a suburb.”

“I guess suburbs are the same everywhere.”

June stopped and turned her head sharply. “What makes you say that?” Her voice had an edge to it; Wes felt the muscles in his neck clench. But when he looked at her, he could see that she wasn’t angry.

He said, “It’s just that every suburb I’ve been to is kind of the same.”

June stared at him. “That was weird.”

“What was?”

“What you said was exactly the same thought, word for word, that went through my head a nanosecond before you said it.”

Wes grinned. “I guess I’m psychic.”

“Psych-o, maybe.” She laughed, letting him know she was kidding. “So what am I thinking right now?”

Wes closed his eyes and waited for an image to appear. “You’re thinking about a double bacon cheeseburger,” he said after a moment.

“Wrong.”

“What were you thinking?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“Not fair!”

“Okay, actually, you weren’t that far off. I was thinking about a chocolate éclair.”

“Both food. High fat. Delicious.”

“Exactly. But that could just be because it’s teatime.”

“You drink tea?”

“No. But sitting down to a mid-afternoon snack and a caffeinated beverage strikes me as a very civilized custom.” They had started walking again.

“I agree,” said Wes, suddenly acutely aware that he had exactly twenty-six cents in his pocket. They had reached the corner of Twelfth and Hendricks. He stopped and pointed up Twelfth Street. “This is where I get off.”

“Oh!” said June, her eyes widening slightly.

“I live about half a mile that way,” Wes said.

“I thought you lived on Fourteenth?”

“I take Twelfth down to Barnard, then up to Fourteenth.”

“Oh. Well. It was nice talking.”

“I’m supposed to be home when my little sister gets there,” Wes said. It was not strictly true — Paula was notoriously competent on her own, but he felt the need to give June some reason for leaving, but not the real reason — that if they walked by the B&B, he couldn’t afford to buy anything, and if she bought herself that éclair he would just be standing there like a broke-ass idiot. Plus, there was the whole Izzy thing.

“I get it,” June said.

Wes pondered those three words all the way home.

J
UNE
’
S PARENTS WERE AT SOME BUSINESS THING,
so she made her own dinner: a cheese and green pepper omelet, a handful of Ritz crackers, and a kosher pickle. She put the food on a blue plate and set it on the table. The yellow and green omelet and the orange crackers and the dull green pickle stared back at her. Suddenly, it did not look like food; it looked like a very bad painting. Her appetite deserted her. She scraped the omelet into the trash, put the crackers back in their box, and returned the pickle to its jar.

Later, she worked her way through a tray of chocolate chip cookies as she flipped through television channels. At one point she paused at an infomercial for Sani-Made, the company that had hired her father as a consultant. Sani-Made had started out as a diaper service, then branched out into other baby products like cribs and toys and pacifiers. In the infomercial, they were selling Gerald Genius, a $49.95 CD set that supposedly would make your baby smarter.

June’s father was a workout specialist. It had nothing to do with working out, as in exercising. Elton Edberg was hired by companies that were in trouble. He helped them work their way back to profitability. Most of his jobs only lasted a few months, which was why June had lived so many places.

The infomercial showed an animation of a baby listening happily to his brightly colored Sani-Made CD player, then toddling over to a whiteboard and scrawling out a complex mathematical formula. She could see why the company was in trouble.

The first thing her dad had done when he’d started at Sani-Made was fire half the employees. Then he’d gone into his usual shtick about moving forward, always forward, never looking back, creating a viable future, thinking outside the box, thinking positive, thinking wealthy. He liked to say, “If we can dream it, we can do it!”

June clicked the remote. World War II documentary.
Click. Law & Order
rerun.
Click. Leave It to Beaver.
June Cleaver, the perfect 1950s housewife, was making a nutritious meal for Wally and Beaver.

June ate another cookie.
Click.

One thing Wes hated about himself was that he was always rethinking things he’d said or done, and then figuring how it
should
have gone. It drove him crazy. For example, he kept thinking about talking to that girl, June, and blurting out that he had to go home to babysit his sister. He was sure she had known he was lying. He
should
have said, “The B and B has excellent éclairs.”

She would have said, “Let’s go!”

And he would have said, “I’m afraid I’m not able to today, as I have other obligations. Perhaps another time?”

That would have been better. Except he didn’t really talk like that.

Or, when she had asked him to guess her thoughts, he could have said something besides “double bacon cheeseburger.” He could have said, “Molecules.” Or, if he’d brought some money with him to school, then he could have offered to buy her an éclair. Better yet, if he hadn’t stopped to tie his shoe, then he wouldn’t have had to deal with her at all. The last thing he needed was another girlfriend. The whole idea of breaking up with Izzy was to get some freedom. And besides, the reason he hadn’t brought any money to school was so that he wouldn’t spend it on something stupid like éclairs.

And why had he told her his middle name was
August?
He hoped she got it, that he was kidding.

He was still thinking about all that when he got home, so he went straight to the garage to admire the results of his cleaning project. Over the previous three afternoons he had swept, scrubbed, and organized every part of the garage — even to the point of painting the floor light gray. Wes sat on one of the stools and let himself be soothed by his surroundings. An island of orderliness and cleanliness.

He kept thinking about his conversation with Aqua Girl, and the more he thought about it, the more unhappy he became. He didn’t even like her, not really. But for some reason he kept seeing her face, those too-wide eyes and blond hair and big lips — not fakey lips like from collagen injections, but lips just a fraction bigger than you would expect, like her eyes. And that little scar on her chin.

After a time he succeeded in forcing his thoughts away from her and onto another vexing problem, that of Jerry Preuss. If Wes wasn’t careful, Jerry would have him putting up lawn signs, or
walking around wearing a sandwich board. Still, Jerry had been his friend since kindergarten, so Wes couldn’t just blow him off. He might have to actually do something. Wes stared at the perfectly clean, freshly painted garage floor and focused his mind on the problem. A few minutes later he went to the house, where he found Paula sitting at the kitchen table eating a peanut butter and honey sandwich.

“You’re going to spoil your appetite,” he said, parroting their mother.

Paula stuck a peanut butter-coated tongue out at him. Wes picked up the phone and dialed Jerry’s number.

“I’ve been thinking about your problem,” Wes said when he answered.

“I have a problem?”

“Yeah, you want to get elected president.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“Are you ready?”

“I think so.”

“T-shirts.”

Jerry did not immediately reply.

“T-shirts cost money,” he said at last.

“Donations,” Wes said. “You ask people for money, then offer to do them special favors if you get voted into office.” When Jerry once again did not immediately reply, Wes added, “It’s brilliant.”

Jerry said, “You know that girl June?”

Wes was confused. “What about her?”

“I was telling her about me running for class president. She had an idea too. She said I should promise people a four-day school week.”

“How would you do that?”

“Just promise it, I guess, then worry about how to do it later on. Like real politicians.”

“Oh … so … are you into her?”

“I don’t know,” said Jerry. “Maybe.”

E
ACH MORNING IT GOT A LITTLE COOLER.
At first, June welcomed the early-autumn chill. Walking to school when it was sunny and sixty-two degrees was not so bad. But by the first week of October, the weather had turned colder and rainy, and she had to beg her mom for a ride. Still, she had to walk home after school.

She hadn’t talked to floppy-haired Wes since that one day. She saw him in language arts, and sometimes in the hallways between classes, but he always seemed preoccupied, off in his own world.

Phoebe wanted her to hook up with Van Griswold, a vacant but not unattractive jock whose father owned Griswold Motors. Van drove a different car to school almost every week.

“You wouldn’t have to worry about walking home from school,” Phoebe pointed out. They were sitting in the bleachers after school, watching the track team run drills. Van Griswold was a hurdler, though not a very good one. He ran with short, mincing steps, and his leaps over the hurdles were high and ungainly.

“I tried to talk to him once,” June said. “He’s kind of dense.”

“So? Oh! There’s Josh!” Josh Sandstrom, a friend of Van’s, also a hurdler, was Phoebe’s current love interest. “Go, Josh!” she shouted as he launched himself over the first hurdle. Startled, Josh looked up at precisely the wrong moment; his trailing knee struck the bar, his ankle crumpled, and he collapsed, skidding to a stop on the cinder track.

“Oops,” said Phoebe.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have yelled,” June said.

Phoebe clutched her heart. “Josh …”

Josh climbed slowly to his feet. Aside from an ugly scrape on his knee and elbow, he seemed to be okay. As he limped off the track, he looked up at Phoebe and June. His mouth formed a word. They were too far away to hear him, but June was certain the word was “bitch.”

Phoebe shrugged. “Oh, crap.”

Sometimes, Wes didn’t get why he did certain things. Or maybe he did get it, but he just didn’t want to think about it. Like changing the way he walked to and from school.

He had given up on the bus unless it was pouring rain. Jerry thought he was nuts, and maybe he was, but the idea of being crammed into a big steel tube with fifty or sixty other kids turned his stomach sour. As for changing his walking route, that had to do with Aqua Girl. In fact, many of Wes’s decisions concerning where to go and how to get there were influenced by his wanting to avoid both June and Izzy. He had this feeling about June, like if he got to know her any better his life would get really confusing, especially with Jerry having some sort of thing for her. As for Izzy, he just didn’t want to deal with all that history. So he took a roundabout way to school, walking down alleys and cutting through parks and turning his mile-and-a-half walk into two miles.