The Big Crunch (6 page)

Later, walking home, Wes replayed the conversation in his head and couldn’t figure out what had made him so mad.

M
OST OF THE GUYS
J
UNE HAD GONE OUT WITH
thought it was their sacred duty to attempt to grope every square inch of her body. She was not opposed to a little groping, so long as it did not involve discomfort, bad smells, or excessive bodily fluids. But she didn’t enjoy being forced to slap, kick, or yell at her dates.

Jerry was no problem. She’d been with guys who were cuter and sexier and more exciting, but with Jerry she never had to worry about him going all caveman on her. He seemed happy just to be in her presence — and that was both good and bad. He was an intense guy, but most of his intensity was focused on politics. That was good. It meant that if she decided she didn’t want to see him anymore, he probably wouldn’t fall apart, or become a stalker, or go around telling everybody what a bitch she was. It was important, according to Pragmatic June, to always have an exit strategy.

Until that day came, being with Jerry was okay. They went out once a week, usually to a movie, and they saw each other in school, and sometimes at the coffee shop, and he would call her. Her mom liked Jerry. June’s theory was that her mom used her super-mom sense to detect that they weren’t having sex or anything. That was all her mom cared about — that her daughter avoid “entanglements.”

The Three Bitches, it turned out, were okay with Jerry. Since Phoebe had made up with Josh Sandstrom, they’d gone on a double
date. Josh was a nice guy once you got him away from his jock buddies. He and Jerry had discovered a mutual fascination with martial arts movies. Jess and Britt found their own regulars — guys they could count on to hang with them. It was a pretty comfortable arrangement, all in all.

By late October, Jerry had eased off on his election campaign to focus on his schoolwork. June was sailing through her own classes, even physical science. She had thought science would be her worst class, but Mr. Reinhardt was one of those teachers you just couldn’t help but listen to, even when he was talking about numbers and stuff that made no sense.

They were studying cosmology — all about the origin of the universe and outer space and gravity and something called dark matter. June didn’t understand most of it, but she liked hearing about the Big Bang, how thirteen billion years ago there was nothing. No matter, no space, no time — just a thing called a singularity that was smaller than a grain of salt, yet it contained everything that ever existed. Then the singularity exploded. The explosion was still happening. The Earth and sun and even the galaxy were just tiny fragments, rushing through space at more than a million miles per hour. As strange as all that sounded, June believed it. She didn’t
understand
it, but it felt right that she should be riding a spinning chunk of shrapnel headed for nowhere.

By the middle of November, Wes realized that he had fallen behind in school. He began paying attention in his classes, and quickly caught up on his reading. The weather was getting too cold to walk most days, but Alan Hurd got a hand-me-down car
from his mother and started giving him a ride to and from school — as long as Wes bought him a donut every morning.

Jerry Preuss cooled on his election campaign, at least temporarily. Wes was happy about that, as he had neither the time nor the inclination to take on any more election-related tasks. As for Aqua Girl, he saw her in class, and that was it. The sight of her still stirred up feelings, but it was more like a sense of relief that he hadn’t got mixed up with her.

Izzy he managed to avoid entirely — he heard she was seeing Thom Samples, a senior.

The garage slowly fell victim to entropy. Small projects undertaken by Wes or his father created nodes of chaos that multiplied to become larger messes, and then, with the first heavy snows of mid-November, his mother insisted on parking her car in the garage, which meant a frantic hour of shoving everything against the walls or cramming stuff onto shelves, and with the car came chunks of ice and road salt and mud. The beautiful gray floor became blackened and gritty. Wes lost interest in the garage and began spending his spare time hanging out with the two Alans in Alan Schwartz’s basement, playing video games and watching movies and, every now and then, when Calvin Warner and Robbie Johanson came over, playing poker. Wes lost more than he won.

One Sunday afternoon in early December, during the first ten minutes of one of those poker games, Wes lost the entire forty dollars he had brought. He sat around for a while watching the others play. Calvin was going on and on about SHC, or Spontaneous Human Combustion, which is when a person bursts
into flames for no reason. Calvin said it happened all the time; he’d read a book about it.

“They find a pile of ashes where there used to be a person,” he said.

“Maybe they were trying to light a fart,” said Alan Hurd. “Raise five.”

Wes suddenly became disgusted with himself and the whole scene, so he put on his jacket and said, “I gotta go.”

Alan Hurd, who had given Wes a ride over, looked up and said, “You gonna
walk?”

“I guess so,” said Wes.

Alan went back to playing his hand. As far as the rest of them were concerned, Wes had already left.

June hated Minnesota. She had hated Illinois, Kansas, Arizona, and Texas, but her most fervent loathing she reserved for Minnesota.

It wasn’t the people. People were the same everywhere. Even Jerry Preuss, who had become her unofficial boyfriend, was just another guy with all the niceness, clumsiness, awkwardness, and
irritatingness
of boys everywhere. Jess, Phoebe, and Britt — they were all okay too. And the school was fine — just another school.

But the
weather.
Minnesota was the frozen armpit of the galaxy.
No,
said Scornful June,
it’s the frozen
asshole
of the
universe.

Especially on weekends, like this weekend, when she’d planned nothing more than to maybe go to the mall with the Three Bitches, and instead her mom got the Cold from Hell and turned her into Little Miss Home Health Care. Like if June didn’t run over to the
SuperAmerica and get her some orange juice in, like, five minutes she would die.

That was the thing with her mom. She tried so hard to be perfect, but let one little thing go wrong — a bad perm, a cold,
whatever
— and she fell apart.

Also, the orange juice in Minnesota tasted like gasoline. Even worse than Kansas and Illinois. She thought about that as she pulled on her parka. Why should the orange juice taste different in Minnesota? Didn’t it all come from Florida?

Her hair was a mess, and she didn’t have her contacts in so she put on her old eyeglasses, and then she couldn’t find her hat. Since she was just running over to the SA and probably wouldn’t see anybody, she put on this ridiculous thing of her mom’s — a pink knit cap with fuzzy earflaps and an absurdly long tassel — and left for the SA.

It had started snowing again, and it was
cold,
like below-zero cold. Wes turned up his collar, pulled his stocking cap as far down as it would go, jammed his bare hands deep into the pockets of his thin leather jacket, and headed up Garfield Street at a brisk walk. It was even colder and windier than he’d thought, and it was almost four miles to home. The snow was that fine, sharp, crystalline variety that stung like shotgun pellets. Ice crystals found their way down his collar and into his eyes. Soon, he was running with his hands in his pockets, his eyes slitted, his chin buried in his collar, his retro canvas basketball shoes slapping and skidding on the icy sidewalk.

I could die out here
, he thought.
I could get frostbite. Hypothermia.

His right foot hit a patch of glare ice and he fell, landing hard on his hip. For a few seconds he thought he’d broken something, but it was too cold to just lie there, so he got to his feet and started walking. Everything seemed to work, except he was freezing. He looked around. Nothing but anonymous houses — he didn’t know anybody in the neighborhood. He kept walking. Three miles to go, at least. Wes had never run three miles in his life, but if he kept walking he would freeze to death for sure, so he broke into a run again. For a few blocks he hardly thought about the cold, but soon he was sweating and wheezing, and he had to stop. The cold slammed into him like a great frozen hammer.

A few blocks ahead were some lights — the SuperAmerica! He could warm up inside the store and call home for a ride. He began to jog again, and a minute later he was inside the SA gasping for breath. As his breathing calmed and his body warmed, he noticed the woman behind the counter staring at him.

“Cold out there,” he said with what he hoped was a friendly grin.

The woman shook her head. “You kids don’t know how to dress,” she said.

“I didn’t know I’d be walking,” Wes said.

“You kids never think about consequences,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “Do you have a phone I can use?”

“Pay phone outside,” she said.

“I don’t have any money.”

The woman shook her head. “You kids. Store policy is no free calls.”

“Please? I live, like, three miles away from here. I just want to call my mom for a ride.”

She made him wait a few more seconds, giving him the evil eye, then sighed as if the responsibility of being an adult was an unbearable weight upon her soul, opened her purse, and handed him her cell phone.

Paula answered on the fourth ring.

“Hey, Paula, it’s Wes. Is Mom home?”

“Noper.”

“Where is she?”

“She just left for aerobics.”

“How long ago?”

“I don’t know. Ten minutes?”

That was bad. She wouldn’t be reachable for another hour and a half at least. Aerobics class was one of the few times their mom was completely incommunicado.

“Okay, thanks.”

“Are you coming home?” Paula asked.

“I’m working on it.” He hung up and tried to think who to call next. Maybe Jerry. He started to dial but was interrupted by the counter woman.

“I didn’t say you could call the whole phone book. I only have three hundred minutes a month.”

Wes handed her the phone.

Ordinarily, June liked driving her mom’s BMW, but the trip to the SA with the streets all slippery and snow blowing across the roads was no fun at all, not even in an arctic adventure sort of way. The extreme cold made her think of outer space. Even in deepest space, Mr. Reinhardt said, there was no true vacuum. There might be only one or two atoms per cubic meter of space, but there was
always
something.
Atoms were running into each other all the time, like snowflakes. And in a few billion or trillion or centillion years, the Big Bang would reverse direction and atoms would start colliding more often, and eventually they would all be drawn into a single tiny node where every atom in the universe was touching every other atom, and time would stop. According to Mr. Reinhardt, this was called the Big Crunch, when the entire universe became an infinitesimal dot. And then the Big Bang would happen all over again. She found that reassuring — that no matter how messed up the universe got, it would eventually have another chance to get it right.

She was thinking about that as she pulled into the SA and got out and walked through the door.

A girl wearing an enormous down ski parka, fogged-up glasses, and a pink hat with a long tassel entered in a swirl of wind and snow. She walked past Wes, heading for the cooler at the back of the store. She stopped in front of the juice section. It was hard not to look at her, with that hat. The tassel hung all the way down to her thighs, ending in a fuzzy pink ball.

“You kids,” said the counter woman. “You think she ever gets that thing caught in a door?”

The girl grabbed a half gallon of orange juice from the cooler. When she turned around, coming back toward the register, Wes recognized her.

“Hey, June,” he said.

June pulled up, startled, and dropped the juice. Both she and Wes bent over quickly to get the carton and they banged heads so hard that Wes fell to his knees and, for a second, thought he was
going to pass out. He reached up to touch his forehead, expecting to find a bloody mess. There was no blood, but the lump was already forming. June had fallen back on her butt and was sitting with one pink-nailed hand cupped over her left eye.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“L
ET ME SEE,
”
SAID
W
ES,
kneeling in front of her. He gently grasped her wrist and moved her hand away from her eye. He could see right away where his forehead had hit her cheekbone, just below her left eye. It seemed important to get her off the floor, which was dirty and wet from people tracking snow into the store.

“Can you stand up?” he asked.

“I think so.”

Wes helped her to her feet.

“My glasses,” she said. They found her glasses a few feet away. One lens was cracked and the frames were bent. “They’re crunched.” June folded them and put them in the pocket of her parka.

“I’m really sorry,” Wes said.

“We crunched.”

“Uh … yeah, we did. I’m sorry.”

“Do I need to call nine-one-one?” asked the woman behind the counter.

“I don’t … I need to look at my face,” June said.

The woman pointed toward the back of the store. Wes, still holding her hand, started walking her toward the restrooms, but June shook him off.

“I can walk,” she said.

Wes watched her go. He noticed that the end of her pink tassel was filthy — she had fallen on it and ground it into the dirty floor.

“You kids have got to learn to be more careful,” the counter woman said.

June thought she had never seen anything so awful as her face in that restroom mirror. It wasn’t just the swelling, and the promise of an enormous black eye. It was the whole disgusting package — the pale winter skin, no makeup, dirty hair, and the pink hat. She cleaned up as best she could, then moistened a paper towel and sat on the toilet and pressed the wet towel to her cheek.