At the Edge of the Universe

  “Why don’t you just meet with Dr. Laurie, and we can take it from there?”

  “Or,” I said, “you could eat a bag of deep-fried dicks. How does that sound?”

  • • •

  Mom and Dad were waiting for me when I got home. They were both sitting at the breakfast nook. And they were talking. The last time I’d seen them in the same room together was Renny’s going-away dinner.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Is Renny all right? Did something happen to him?”

  Dad stood and held up his hands. “Warren’s fine.”

  “Then what’s going on?” My heart was racing.

  Mom pushed out a chair between her and Dad. “Sit down, Ozzie. Your father and I want to talk to you.”

  I dropped my backpack by the stairs and trudged to the chair. On the table lay two more letters. One from UF and one from NYU. Without waiting for permission, I tore them open. Yes from UF, no from NYU. I was all grins when I looked up.

  “I got into the University of Florida!”

  Dad took the letters and read each. “That’s good, son. Good for you. Actually, that’s part of what we wanted to discuss with you.” He glanced at my mom. “Kat, do you want to start?”

  Mom nodded. “Ozzie, sweetheart, we sold the house.” Whenever she had to tell me something she knew I wasn’t going to like, she spoke in a firm but annoyingly reassuring tone, like I was five again and she was telling me my goldfish had died and she was worried I might have a complete meltdown. “It’s not as much as we’d hoped for, but your father and I agree we’re not likely to get a better offer.”

  “Good for you?” I knew it was for the best that my parents separated and finalized their divorce, but we were talking about my childhood home. It was the backdrop for all of my memories; the idea of strangers living in it felt wrong.

  “I’ve already bought a three-bedroom condo in Seabrook,” Dad said. “It’s only a few miles from here.”

  I wasn’t ready to get into an argument over who I would end up living with, because maybe I would go to college, and then it wouldn’t matter. All I’d need was somewhere to crash on holidays and during the summer, and I wouldn’t even need to stay with one of my parents. Ms. Novak would definitely let me sleep on her couch. And if I did decide to hang around Cloud Lake to wait for Tommy, well, maybe I could split my time between my mom and dad equally.

  Then Mom said, “And I’ve accepted a job as the COO of a robotics company.”

  “Okay?” I said.

  “They’re based in Chicago, Ozzie. I’m moving to Chicago.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t think my parents divorcing would mean they wouldn’t live in the same state anymore, but the idea didn’t upset me. At least I wouldn’t have to choose between them.

  “It’s . . . whatever,” I said. “I’m probably going to college anyway. I’m leaning toward UC Boulder, but New College is tempting. And Dustin’s going to UF, so that’s always an option.”

  Mom and Dad glanced at each other. They’d spent so long together that they didn’t need words to communicate. Maybe that’s what had caused the end of their relationship. Maybe they ran out of words.

  Also, my father was a cheating asshole.

  “Oz,” Dad said. “Dr. Nelson called us.”

  Uh-oh.

  “He’s concerned about you, and so are your mom and I.”

  “Listen, I’m not going back to him. I’ll find a different therapist. He wants to put me on pills. Yeah, okay, I shouldn’t have told him to eat a bag of dicks—”

  “You did what?” Mom said, her face darkening.

  Clearly Dr. Nelson hadn’t told them that part. “That’s not important,” I said. “Just, I’m not crazy and I don’t need to be put on medication.”

  “Ozzie,” Mom said. “Dr. Nelson is concerned that, with all of the changes in your life, leaving your support system might not be best for your mental health.”

  “What support system? You’re leaving, Warren’s gone, Lua and Dustin can’t wait to escape Cloud Lake, and I don’t know if I’ll ever see Tommy again.” I didn’t give them the chance to respond. “I don’t have a support system.”

  Dad sighed. “Be that as it may, we—your mother and I—think it would be best if you lived with me and attended community college for a semester or two. You can defer enrollment at one of your other schools for a year, but until you’re sorted out, we think this is the right thing for you.”

  I stood up so quickly I knocked my chair over. “That’s not your decision to make!” Mom reached out to me, but I pulled away.

  “Ozzie . . .”

  “It’s not my fault you guys are getting divorced. Don’t punish me for your mistakes.”

  Dad didn’t do “serious” often, but he was serious now. “Weren’t you the one considering going to community college anyway?” he asked. “Maybe you were right. We think—”

  “There’s no ‘we’ anymore!” I yelled. “You’re not a we. Whether I stay here or go to college, or join Greenpeace so I can lob fake-blood-filled balloons at whalers, is my choice, not yours.”

  Dad’s usually soft face hardened. “I hate to inform you, son, but unless you can pay for school on your own, it is our decision.”

  I turned to Mom. “You can’t let him do this!”

  “It’s only for a semester,” she said. “Two at most.”

  My mom and dad hadn’t presented a united front on anything in well over a year. It didn’t matter whether I wanted to leave or not, they had come together to rob me of the ability to choose for myself. My mouth opened, but I couldn’t speak. They’d robbed me of that, too.

  I stormed upstairs and slammed my door behind me.

  TOMMY

  I FIND TOMMY ON THE swings. He doesn’t hear me approach from behind, or if he does, he doesn’t acknowledge me. I stand at the edge of the mulch perimeter and watch. Tommy kicks higher and higher; his back arches and his arms straighten as he strains to gain momentum.

  I don’t understand the appeal of swings. It doesn’t matter how hard you kick or how much effort you expend; you never actually go anywhere. All that work is futile, but Tommy tries anyway. I imagine him swinging so high his feet touch the moon. He lets go at the top of his arc and sails into the starry sky.

  But that’s not what happens. Eventually Tommy drags his feet through the rust-colored wood chips and stops.

  “Hey,” I say, kicking at the ground to make sure I don’t startle him.

  Tommy turns around. Even in the fading daylight the bruises around his right eye and on his neck are visible. Blood cakes his upper lip under his nose. He doesn’t smile when he sees me.

  “I tried the trailer, but your mom said you’d gone for a walk.”

  “Sorry,” he says. “I had to get out of there.”

  “I get it.” I sit in the swing next to his. The chains groan. I doubt they’re meant to hold the weight of teenage boys. “Your dad do that?”

  Tommy nods. “I forgot to put the lid on the trash, and raccoons got into it.”

  “Oh.”

  “It looks worse than it is.”

  I twist in the swing, catching glimpses of Tommy from the corner of my eye. “You’ve got to get out of there,” I say. “When we go to college—”

  “I’m never getting out of Cloud Lake,” Tommy says. “I’m going to wind up stuck here like Pops and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “You can do anything you want. Maybe we can talk to my parents about you living with us until we graduate next year.”

  “Right,” Tommy says with a bitter laugh.

  “And with your grades, I bet you can get a scholarship—”

  “I’m not going to college, Ozzie!” Tommy stands, leaving the swing shaking. He walks to the slide and sits at the bottom. “You don’t get it. You’ll never get it.”

  “Then tell me.”

  Tommy scrubs his face with his hands. “You think everything is easy. You think anything is possible because you’re white and
your parents have money and all your life people have told you there’s nothing out of your reach.”

  “I know it’s harder for you—”

  “You don’t know shit,” he says.

  “We can figure this out, Tommy.”

  Tommy falls silent. I wish I could read his mind. Cloud Lake isn’t exactly diverse, and Tommy’s always been one of the few black kids in town, but I didn’t think it bothered him.

  “People see me,” Tommy says. “And all they see is my skin. Most of them don’t even take the time to get to know me before passing judgment. I’m black first, everything else a distant second.”

  “Not to me.”

  “Fuck you,” he says. “I don’t need you to save me, Ozzie.” Tommy looks at me, his eyes so intense. “You know why my mama sticks around?” he says. “Why she puts up with him beating on her and on me?”

  I shake my head.

  “Because no matter what he does to her, he’s not as scary as the unknown. She has no idea who she is without my pops, and she’s terrified to find out.” Tommy hugs his knees to his chest. “I don’t want to end up like that, but I don’t know how not to.”

  “Please just let me help.”

  “No,” Tommy says. “Whatever I do, I need to know I did it on my own, even if I don’t know who I am yet.”

  “You want me to take you home?” I ask after a while.

  “Can we just drive around?” he asks.

  “Sure.”

  Tommy doesn’t talk while we drive, so I turn on some music and roll down the windows. I drive all the way to Calypso before Tommy tells me he should get back so he can check on his mom.

  When I drop him off in front of the trailer, he leans back in through the window and says, “Do you ever wonder who you’d be if we’d never met?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t even want to think about it.”

  Tommy shrugs. “Don’t you think maybe you should?”

  381,705 KM

  MS. NOVAK WAVED ME DOWN AND held up a plastic tumbler of iced tea. I tried to shout I’d be done in a couple of minutes, but she couldn’t hear me over the lawnmower’s choppy growl. The grass was thick, and sand spurs clung to my shoelaces, though they were probably about the most benign things hiding in the weedy overgrowth. By the time I finished the front yard, my shirt was soaked through with sweat, so I tugged it off and threw it on the trunk of my car to dry.

  “Thanks for helping, Oz,” Ms. Novak said when I walked over to take the iced tea. It was a rare day off for her, and she was using the time to clean the house. She wore a Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt she’d gotten from a concert she’d attended before I was born.

  “No problem.” I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was until I finished the tea in three big gulps.

  “Sorry Lua’s not around to help.” Ms. Novak paused. “I’m worried about her.”

  “She’s not really talking to me.” Lua had started skipping school again and had stopped answering her phone. I’d driven to her house Saturday morning, determined to confront her, but Ms. Novak had answered the door instead, which was how I’d ended up mowing the lawn.

  “Me neither.” Ms. Novak had hardly touched her own iced tea and handed it to me to finish. “Mr. Hightower called from the guidance office. Said Lua’s in danger of not graduating.”

  I believed it. At the rate Lua was going, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the principal barred her from attending prom. “Have you ever heard her play?”

  Ms. Novak nodded. “Yeah, but Lua doesn’t know. I snuck into one of her shows a few months ago. My girl’s talented.”

  “I think she broke more than her hand that night.”

  “She can still go on her tour,” Ms. Novak said.

  I shrugged. “Maybe. They could hire another guitarist or something, but right now I don’t think Lua’s willing to consider that. Playing is just as important to her as singing.”

  Ms. Novak furrowed her brow and looked at me. “Didn’t she tell you? That boy, the one who slammed her hand in the door. He came by with his parents, and they offered to pay for her surgery.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Lua didn’t tell you?”

  “No.”

  “She turned them down. Said she didn’t want handouts from nobody.”

  Normally I would have said that sounded exactly like Lua, but her music meant everything to her. I never imagined she’d put her pride over her band. And it wasn’t even a handout; paying for the surgery after breaking her fingers was the least Trent could do.

  “Sometimes I think I did Lua wrong by teaching her to only rely on herself. I wanted her to be independent, but I forgot to tell her it’s okay to ask for help.” Ms. Novak fell silent for a moment and then shook her head. “Enough about my stupid mistakes. How’re things with you, Ozzie? Lua tells me you’ve got a new boyfriend.”

  “Calvin,” I said. “But he’s not my boyfriend.”

  “Why not?”

  Even though I’d never explicitly spoken to Ms. Novak about Tommy since he’d vanished, I knew Lua must’ve told her. “I’m hung up on someone else.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “But if I start a relationship with Calvin, I’m giving up on Tommy. And if I keep looking for Tommy, I might miss out on something great with Cal.”

  Ms. Novak chuckled again, like my pain, my indecisiveness, was a joke. “I’ve dated a lot of men since Lua was born, I even fell in love with a couple, but I never stopped loving her father. I doubt I ever will.”

  “How’s that fair?”

  “Fair to who?”

  “To you?” I said. “To the other guys?”

  Ms. Novak shrugged. “I don’t suppose it is, Ozzie. But the world’s going to offer you an endless array of what-ifs over the course of your life, and the only choices that matter are the ones you make.”

  I finished off the second tumbler of iced tea. I understood what she was trying to tell me, but she was talking about making one choice that shut the door on all those other possibilities, and as much as I was starting to like Cal, I couldn’t close the door on Tommy.

  “Thanks for the tea. I should cut the back before it gets dark.”

  377,092 KM

  I STOOD IN FRONT OF the mailbox, holding the envelope, trying to decide whether to stuff it into the outgoing slot or fold it up, stick it in my back pocket, and walk away.

  I’d chosen UC Boulder because they had a great medieval literature department and mountains I could have driven up into and watched the stars from without the lights of the city obscuring them, if there’d still been stars to see. But I wasn’t sure if I was ready to make this decision. Accepting my place at UC Boulder didn’t have to mean I would actually go, it didn’t mean I was definitely making the choice to give up on Tommy, it just meant I was leaving the option open to choose later. Of course, I’d also have to figure out how to convince my parents to change their minds. My visit with Dr. Laurie hadn’t gone well. She’d spent fifteen minutes with me, asking if I had any allergies and did I hear voices and had I ever taken psychiatric medication before, and then wrote me a prescription for a bottle full of little peach squares I was supposed to swallow each morning. I hadn’t decided whether I was going to comply with my new doctor’s orders—doing so would be admitting I thought there was something wrong with me, and other than a severe case of chronic indecision, I didn’t believe there was—but I hoped at least pretending to go along might help convince my parents I didn’t need to stick around Cloud Lake.

  But regardless of what they’d said, this wasn’t my parents’ decision. It wasn’t theirs or Lua’s or Dustin’s or Tommy’s. It was mine. The future—my future—belonged to me and no one else.

  I slid the envelope through the slot and stood back. I’d done it. I was going to UC Boulder.

  If there was still a Colorado left by the time I graduated.

  361,448 KM

  CALVIN GRUNTED “HELLO” WHEN HE got into the car and then didn?
??t speak for the rest of the drive. I’d picked him up to go to a party at Dustin’s house. Mr. and Mrs. Smeltzer had traveled to New York for a wedding, and Dustin had decided to throw a party—the first and only grand bash before his parents lost their house.

  I’d grown used to Calvin’s quiet moods, but this one was different. His silence was louder than a plane’s rumble. I’d offered to stay home with him, watch movies, and order Chinese, but he’d mumbled that we should go to the party.

  I only wanted to go because Dustin told me Lua would be there. I wasn’t looking for a fight, but I wasn’t about to let Trent derail Lua’s dreams, even if that meant launching a full verbal assault on my best friend.

  I pulled up to Dustin’s house and led Calvin inside. Dustin’s house wasn’t huge, but it was big enough to comfortably fit a few dozen of my fellow Cloud Lake High seniors, most drinking, some dancing.

  Calvin followed me closely as we searched for Dustin.

  Dr. Laurie had warned me I would need to avoid alcohol with my medication, and since I hadn’t decided whether I was going to take it or not, I grabbed a red cup of vodka and juice and downed half in one gulp.

  We found Dustin in the living room, lounging on the couch with a dozen other people I mostly knew around a three-foot-tall bong. Clouds of sweet, sticky smoke clung to the walls and floated in the air, and I could tell by Dustin’s lazy grin and heavy eyes that he was super high. No air freshener existed strong enough to eliminate the smell before his parents came home on Monday, and they were going to kill him, but, right then, I doubted he cared.

  “Ozzie! Cal! I’d get up, but I can’t get up.” Dustin had spent the last four years focused on earning the best grades and becoming valedictorian so he could attend an Ivy League school, only to see that dream crumble because his parents had made a couple of bad decisions. I’d worried the loss would crush him, but Dustin was stronger than Giles Corey, and definitely stronger than me.

  We made our introductions, and Dustin rattled off everyone’s names, which I promptly forgot. There was a Sabrina, a Joel, two Austins. Too many names to remember. I called everyone “dude” or “hey, you” out of necessity, and no one seemed to mind.