The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen

  That’s right. Robot-Henry even swore at his own grandpa.

  The day Dad and I caught our plane, Mom didn’t even come to the airport. She went to her appointment with her psychiatrist instead. Dr. Dumas called us the next day in Vancouver to tell us that Mom was exhibiting signs of a nervous breakdown, so he’d admitted her to the psych ward, where she’s been ever since.

  I refuse to blame myself.

  Jesse made this mess, not me.

  After we got off the phone with Mom, Dad and I put on the TV. A few minutes later, someone knocked on our door. I looked through the peephole. It was Mr. Atapattu. I think he was holding a plate of food, but I couldn’t be sure.

  I didn’t answer. I just tiptoed back to the couch and tore open a fresh bag of Doritos. Mr. Atapattu must’ve known we were home though, ’cause the TV was playing quite loud and my dad even called out, “Who is it, Henry?”

  But you know what? Tough.

  WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6

  So I caved. I went to a Reach For The Top practice at lunch today. Farley was so excited, he did a little dance. Totally embarrassing.

  When we walked into the room, Alberta was already in her seat. Today she was wearing a purple bowling shirt. The name Loreen was stitched above a pocket. She matched it with a pair of pink stretch pants. Even though I barely glanced at her, Farley whispered in my ear, “You like her.”

  “Do not.”

  “Do.”

  “Do not.”

  “Do.”

  “Do not.”

  “Do.” Et cetera, et cetera.

  I sat beside Ambrose, who was wearing his ugly pom-pom hat.

  “What’s your name again?” he asked.

  “Henry.”

  “Henry what?”

  I hesitated. “Henry Larsen.”

  “O or E?”

  My neck muscles tensed. All it would take is a Google search – “Larsen Port Salish” – and they’d find out everything.

  “O,” I lied.

  “Shore, early, nearly, sly, real, hole, heal, shone, share, shale, shy, rye, hen, hay, hare, has.”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “Duh. They’re anagrams,” he said, like it was obvious. “Using some of the letters in your name.”

  “Oh.”

  “Ambrose is a Scrabble champion,” Parvana piped up, stroking his arm.

  “Oh.”

  “I’m ranked twelfth in BC.”

  “Oh.”

  Mr. Jankovich entered. “Henry, nice to have you back. Let’s get started.”

  These are the questions I remember:

  1) What volcano is on the island of Sicily? (Mount Etna – we all knew that one, but Shen buzzed in first.)

  2) What is the capital of Sicily? (Palermo. Koula.)

  3) Sicily is surrounded by what body of water? (The Mediterranean Sea. Answered by yours truly.)

  4) This actor has played Jack Sparrow, Ichabod Crane, and Gilbert Grape. (Johnny Depp. You can guess who answered that one.)

  There was also a series of “Who Am I?” questions. We kept getting a new clue until we could figure it out.

  Clue A: I grew up in Monroeville, Alabama.

  Clue B: I was a tomboy.

  Clue C: I was good friends with another literary icon, Truman Capote.

  Clue D: I won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961.

  Jerome buzzed in after the fourth clue and gave the right answer: Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. Before I knew it, the bell rang and it was time to leave.

  It wasn’t the absolute worst way to pass an hour.

  After school, Farley followed me out the front doors and fell into step beside me. “I thought you lived up the hill,” I said.

  “I do.”

  “Then why are you walking this way?”

  “I’m hoping you’ll invite me over.”

  “I can’t,” I said. We hadn’t invited anyone over since we’d moved in.

  “Why not?”

  There were a million white lies I could have told, like, “I have way too much homework,” or, “My dad’s home sick.”

  Instead I said, “The place is a mess.”

  Lame.

  Farley just grinned. “Not a problem. I love messes!”

  So Farley walked with me to our apartment. We started out on tree-lined residential streets. Then, after a few blocks, we turned left onto Broadway. We walked past four produce stores, five coffee shops, three bookstores, and a gazillion sushi restaurants. We passed the billiard hall, where men in sweater-vests stood outside, speaking in Greek and drinking coffee from tiny cups. Farley was trying to tell me the entire story line from Season 1 of “Battlestar Galactica,” but I tuned him out.

  Then I saw the Crazy Lady up ahead. She was outside the Vietnamese restaurant, wearing a purple dress, red kneesocks, and hot pink Crocs. She sang tunelessly while strumming on a plastic dollar-store guitar.

  The Crazy Lady is there most days when I walk home from school, and the sight of her always makes me queasy.

  “C’mon,” I said to Farley, “let’s cross here.” I didn’t tell him we’d have to cross back a block later. I do this all the time to avoid the Crazy Lady.

  When we got to our dingy gray building, my stomach was in knots. I took Farley up the back stairs so we wouldn’t run into Mr. Atapattu. I unlocked the door, and we stepped inside.

  Suddenly I felt ashamed. The beige carpeting is covered in burn marks. The white walls haven’t been white for years. Everything looks dingy and worn. Plus, we brought all the furniture from our three bedroom house and tried to fit it into a one bedroom + den, so it’s jammed with stuff that’s too big for the rooms. You have to squeeze your way past the big brown leather couch and the big brown leather La-Z-Boy and the big oak coffee table to get to the galley kitchen.

  But Farley just said, “Wow, what a cool apartment!” Then he made a beeline for the shelf that held my PS3 games. He grabbed Call of Duty 4 off the shelf. “Wanna play?”

  “Sure.”

  As I loaded up the game, he said, “What happened in here?” He pointed to a particularly large burn mark on the carpet, which we’d tried to cover with the coffee table.

  “Rumor has it, the previous tenant had a meth lab,” I told him. “He got caught because he started a fire one day.”

  “Wow. You’re living in a former drug den!” He sounded impressed.

  Confession: Playing Call of Duty 4 with Farley was fun. I hadn’t played with a real live human being in ages. After a while, Farley said, “I need to use your facilities.” It took me a moment to realize he meant the bathroom. I felt ashamed again because my dad and I haven’t cleaned in there once since we moved in. I might keep my own room neat and tidy, but cleaning toilets is not my thing. Also, the toilet seat has a crack in it – if you need to sit down, you have to be very careful or risk getting your bum pinched.

  Sure enough, a few minutes later I heard a yelp. But when I went down the hall to investigate, Farley wasn’t in the bathroom anymore.

  He was in my bedroom.

  My heart started pounding. Where else had he been? What else had he seen?

  He was staring at my Great Dane poster. “You’re a GWF fan, too!” he exclaimed. “This is incredible. We have so much in common, we could practically be related. Separated at birth or what!” I was speechless. There were so many ways that this made no sense. “Except my favorite is Vlad the Impaler,” he continued.

  “Vlad the Impaler?” I blurted. “Are you nuts? That guy is pure evil.”

  “Exactly! Every time he steps into the ring, you know it’s gonna get interesting. Vlad means drama. Did you see last week, when he clotheslined Jett Turbo?”

  “Duh, of course I saw it!”

  We argued for a few more minutes about the Great Dane versus Vlad the Impaler, then Farley saw the time on my alarm clock. “Yikes, I’ve got to go. Maria will start worrying.”

  “Is Maria your mom?” I asked as we headed back to the living room.
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  “No, she’s my nanny.”

  I laughed because I thought he was joking.

  “My parents live in Hong Kong. Maria lives here, with me. She’s from the Philippines.”

  “You’re serious? You don’t live with your parents?”

  He nodded. “They bought the house here two years ago ’cause they wanted me to go to school in Canada. And also because having property here is a good investment. Maria was my nanny in Hong Kong, too, so she moved here with me.” He grabbed his backpack and slung it over his shoulder. “That’s something else we have in common.”

  “What?”

  “We’re both onlies.”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “I’m an only child; you’re an only child.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  Once he was gone, I had to sit down.

  In Port Salish, Mom had an entire wall devoted to family photographs: Jesse, tall and skinny and brown-haired like Mom, and me, short and stocky with bright red hair like Dad, burying Dad up to his neck in sand at the beach; Jesse, Mom, and me around the fire on one of our camping trips; Jesse and me and Dad holding up an enormous salmon we’d caught fishing; plus all the ugly school portraits that tracked us through the years.

  Dad and I haven’t unpacked those pictures yet. They’re in our storage locker downstairs. In fact, unless you know about the shoebox, there’s hardly any evidence in our apartment that Jesse ever existed.

  This is fine by me.

  After all, if your brother is dead, you technically don’t have a brother anymore.

  So I guess I didn’t lie to Farley when I said “Yeah.”

  I am an only child. Jesse saw to that.

  11:00 p.m.

  INTRIGUING FACT: Cremations were done as far back as the Stone Age. They just burned their corpses on open fires.

  These days, most cremations are done in computer-controlled steel ovens. I know because I’ve read all about it online. A body is put into a coffinlike container made of particleboard, then slid into the chamber like a really big roast beef or something. Temperatures reach around 1000°! The corpse takes about one and a half hours to burn.

  When it’s all done, about three to five pounds of bone fragments remain. Those bone fragments are put into a “cremulator,” a machine that grinds them into ashes.

  Some people buy a nice urn to hold a loved one’s ashes. Other people sprinkle them into the ocean, or under a special tree. Some, like “Star Trek” creator Gene Rodenberry, have their ashes shot into outer space. Seriously, he did that.

  Jesse’s ashes are under my dad’s bed.

  I guess that makes us sound like awful people. But, really, we have no idea what to do with him. Put him in an urn and stick him in the living room, so we have to be reminded of him and what he did every single time we’re in there? No, thanks. Sprinkle him in the ocean, so he can be eaten by fish? So that maybe a tiny bit of Jesse could be served to me one night in my salmon? No way. Bury his ashes in a cemetery? No. Jesse was mildly claustrophobic; that would be cruel.

  So, for now, he lives under Dad’s bed in a shoebox. It’s kind of like purgatory, I guess. Not heaven, not hell, but a place in between.

  Come to think of it, I guess we’re living in purgatory, too.

  FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 8

  Cecil was wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt today. He’s a walking, talking hippie stereotype.

  “I was worried about you when you didn’t show up last week,” he said once I’d sat down.

  “I wasn’t feeling well,” I lied.

  “If you can’t make it, leave a message with the front desk, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Then he put his feet up on the desk. His big toe poked through a hole in one of his purple-and-yellow striped socks. He tented his hands under his chin and looked at me intently, waiting for me to “start the dialogue.” (“Start the dialogue” is another one of his favorite expressions.)

  The thing is, I was one step ahead of him. In last period, I’d made a list of topics to discuss, so that it would look like I was opening up; but they were safe topics, things that wouldn’t give him an opportunity to ask leading questions about IT. So I told him about the Reach For The Top Team (“Great that you’re getting involved, Henry, great”), and I told him a little bit about Farley (“Holy Moly, you have a friend already! Fantastic.”). Then I told him about the Crazy Lady.

  “She’s missing a lot of her teeth,” I said. “And she sings these made-up songs.… Her voice is terrible. And her guitar is plastic. It’s from a dollar store.”

  “She makes you uncomfortable.”

  “She makes me sad. I keep thinking, was she always like this? Or did something happen to her along the way? Maybe she has a husband somewhere, and kids. Do they know where she is? Do they know she’s lost her marbles?”

  “Some people fall through the cracks in the system.”

  “Well, they shouldn’t. There shouldn’t be any cracks.”

  “No. There shouldn’t.” Then he leaned forward in his chair and looked me in the eye. “Henry, your mom is in good hands.”

  I felt a flash of anger. “Who said anything about my mom? I’m telling you about the Crazy Lady!”

  Cecil means well. But he keeps trying to find meaning in things that have no meaning.

  I suspect that he’s smoked a lot of pot.

  “Have you started writing in your journal yet?” he asked, changing the subject.

  “A little,” I said. “But only ’cause you said I had to.”

  “I didn’t say you had to. I just thought it might be helpful.”

  “Well, it isn’t.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s dumb.” I was still feeling mad about the Crazy Lady.

  “No one’s forcing you to do it, Henry.”

  “Then maybe I’ll stop.”

  “Okay. If that’s what you want.”

  “You have no idea what I want.”

  “I didn’t say I did.”

  “Well, good. Because you don’t.”

  “What do you want?”

  I want time to rewind back a year. I want to change the course of history. I want to change what I did the night of April 30.

  “I want our session to be over because it’s boring and you’re stupid,” I said.

  If I’d hurt his feelings, he didn’t let it show. He just said, “Okay. I’m going to grant you your wish.” He stood up. “Bye, Henry. See you next week.” Then he started sorting through a bunch of papers on his desk, acting like I wasn’t even there.

  Not very professional, if you ask me. I bet he’s going to charge the province for the whole hour, too, even though we had a full ten minutes left.

  I should write his bosses a letter and tell them to dock his pay.

  3:00 a.m.

  I just had both of my recurring nightmares. Call it a two-for-one special.

  In the first dream, I’m hiding in the yellow tube slide and I can hear Jesse’s cries. Then that one morphs into the second dream, and I’m suddenly at the scene of the crime, and I can’t figure out who I should help first.

  Half the time, I pick Scott. I use SpongeBob SquarePants Band-Aids to try to stop his bleeding, and no matter how many I use, the blood keeps pouring out of his chest.

  Half the time, I pick Jesse. A piece of my brother’s head lies on the corridor floor, by a bank of lockers. It’s a neat break, like a piece from a porcelain doll. I gently pick it up. I line up the piece of his head that I’ve found with the part that is still on his body, trying not to look at his brain, which is on full display. Then I pull out a bottle of glue and glue my brother back together.

  “Thanks,” Jesse says with a smile, “You’re not such a worthless turd after all.”

  Then his smile falters because the glue doesn’t hold. It’s like the nightmare version of “Humpty Dumpty.”

  “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men Couldn’t put Jesse together again.”

 
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 13

  At the end of Home Ec today, Mrs. Bardus announced that we would be starting a new unit next week. “Cooking and nutrition,” she said. “There aren’t enough cooking stations for you to work on your own.”

  I knew what she was going to say next, and I dreaded it. I tried to adopt a nonchalant, preoccupied look as she said, “Please pick a partner. Let me know who you’re working with on your way out.”

  As the new kid, I knew my status. I was on the lowest rung of the ladder. So I waited patiently, figuring that when the other kids were paired off, I’d get the person on the second-lowest rung. My money was on Paula Peters. She’s super shy, and her shoulders always have a dusting of dandruff. But she was snapped up right away by the girl sitting next to her.

  Then I noticed that I wasn’t the only one aiming for a nonchalant, preoccupied look. Alberta was, too. She tugged awkwardly on the sleeve of her oversized man’s suit jacket, which she wore over a knee-length T-shirt and a pair of thick red-and-black polka-dot tights. She wasn’t approaching anyone, and no one was approaching her.

  This surprised me. I’d just assumed she had a ton of friends.

  Kids were pairing off fast. And I must have had a temporary brain fart because I suddenly heard myself saying, “Alberta, would you be my partner?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Whatevs.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “Duh.”

  “Would you just say yes or no?”

  “God! Yes, okay? Quit bugging me.”

  Rude.

  THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 14

  We wrote haiku in English today. They’re super-short poems, unrhymed – first line, five syllables; second line, seven syllables; third line, five syllables. Because it was Valentine’s Day, Mr. Schell asked us to write one that reflected the occasion. I got nine out of ten.

  Haiku

  by Henry K. Larsen