Wonders of the Invisible World (8 page)

I could tell that wasn't the case, though. I could see that something was happening between them, that they were having some kind of shared experience. On my own shoulder, Jarrod's hand still rested, heavy and warm. And after a minute, the boys opened their eyes and looked at each other. They were smiling now. The younger Jarrod looked relieved by whatever he'd been shown. “So now you know it'll all be okay,” my younger self told him. Then they hugged, tight and hard, as if they might never see each other again.

“Boys,” someone called in the distance, and they separated to look over at the garden entrance, where a younger version of my mom stood holding her purse open in front of her, pulling out a set of keys. “Boys, we should get going,” she said. “Jarrod's mom and dad will be ready to have him back home now, I'm sure.”

The boys nodded, then stood and went over to her dutifully. She stroked the younger me on the head and smiled. “What were you two up to over here?” she asked, as if she could sense we'd been doing something we shouldn't have.

The younger me said, “We were talking about the future.”

My mom's smile fell into a frown when she heard my answer. Then she nodded toward the parking lot and said, “Okay. Let's go home now.”

As they turned the corner of the hedgerow and disappeared from sight, I finally turned to Jarrod—my Jarrod—sitting beside me. “What in the world was that?” I asked.

And Jarrod said, “That was you showing me the future back when we were thirteen.”

“No, really,” I said. “What was it?”

Jarrod sighed but kept on going. “On the day my dad got tired of my mom drinking and asked for a divorce, your mom took me and you out here so they could figure out what to do next in private.”

His hand still sat on my shoulder. When I looked at it, he took it away like he'd just been burned.

“What was it that I showed you?” I asked. “What did I show you back then?”

Jarrod leaned over, putting his elbows on his knees, propping his head in his hands, upset that I was still, after that revelation, somehow off script. He tilted his face to look up at me, and his hair flopped across his eyes like a curtain. “This,” he said. “You showed me this. You showed me us, right now, at this very moment, sitting here like this. Talking.”

The trip home felt longer than the one we'd taken to get away from the confines of Temperance. And in the span of time between leaving and returning, though it was only a few hours, it felt like the moon had crashed into the earth, and now every mile of highway I drove down was a desolate stretch of pavement in a world that had come to an end. Because, really, even before Jarrod could get halfway through the rest of his story, everything I thought I knew about the world had truly ended.

He told me that he'd hoped the fountain would jog my memory, because it was special, or at least, it was special to him. He told me that what I'd seen wasn't one of my own memories, but one of his. He'd put his hand on my shoulder because he remembered that I had to be touching someone to show them the things I could see when we were little. “Like what things?” I asked.

And he replied, “Like the future.” He said I'd been able to do that when I was little. And he said that I could do something other than see the future. I could show the things I saw to others if I touched them. “You said it was called
reaching across,
” he said now, and I just sat there shaking my head as I drove by the tired little houses that lined the sides of Route 193 like the facades of small towns in old movies. A gust of wind could have blown those houses over, they seemed so flat and unreal right then.

After he finished his story, I stupidly asked if he had some weird kind of power. He laughed at me and said, “It's not me, Aidan. It's you. It's you who can do this stuff. It's
you
who showed me the future.”

“A future where you were happy and living with your mom again,” I said. “A future where we were still friends. That's what I showed you?”

I looked over, but he hesitated to answer. He seemed worried, began chewing the inside of his cheek nervously, and then he abruptly looked away.

“Yeah,” he finally said to the passenger window, where I could see his face reflected in the glass, his eyes downcast. He seemed disappointed in something he wasn't saying. I was up to speed enough on him to tell when he too was going off script. “A future where we were still friends,” he said, repeating my words in this way that wasn't believable.

He reached into the pocket of his jean jacket to take out his cigarettes but began patting himself down within seconds. “Damn it,” he said. “I'm out.”

“Want me to find a gas station?”

“No,” he said. “We're almost home, and that was my last pack.”

“Last pack?” I said. “Really?”

He nodded. “I told myself I'd quit after I'd smoked the last one. Guess that starts now.”

“Why quit?” I asked as we pulled onto his road a few minutes later. The reflective mailbox that stood at the end of his trailer's dirt drive glowed in the distance as my headlights fell on it.

“I guess because you made me feel bad about it the other day at the lake,” he said. “And because you're right. I shouldn't smoke if I'm playing ball. I need to save my lung capacity for running bases.”

“You're coming back to school, then?” I asked as I pulled down his rutted drive, the Blue Bomb shuddering and knocking like it might fall apart around us.

“Yeah,” he said. Then he sighed, long and drawn out, like he was giving up on something other than cigarettes. “I've got to. Otherwise, I might as well go back to the mall and sign up with Gilbert Humphrey.”

I put the car in park and turned off my headlights, but left the engine running. We sat there for a while, staring into the dark. Jarrod's mom's car was pulled up the drive a little farther. She was probably asleep already, Jarrod speculated. “Has to get up for an early shift at Times Square tomorrow,” he said as he reluctantly grabbed the door handle. The door squealed a little as he opened it, and before he pushed himself out, he looked back at me and said, “What are you going to do about what you saw tonight?”

I looked at my hands gripped on the wheel in front of me and shook my head. “I'm not sure,” I said. “I mean, I know what I saw. But I have no clue what to do about it.”

Jarrod nodded, then slid off the seat into the dark. Before he closed the door, he leaned down and said, “Maybe you'll see more things now, at least. Maybe you'll see things that'll answer your questions.”

“Can't you just tell me?” I asked. “Can't you just share more memories with me?”

He shook his head. “I don't know the whole story,” he said. “Just know my part in it. My dad moved a few weeks after you showed me we'd still be friends in the future. I don't know what happened to you after that, because I went with him. The rest you're going to have to find out on your own.”

My hands were white-knuckled in the moonlight, clenching harder and harder, and I sighed like Jarrod had a minute earlier.

“Hey,” Jarrod said. He ducked his head farther into the car and put his hand on my shoulder like he had in the park, but there was no vision accompanying his touch this time. Instead of reaching across, as Jarrod had called what happened between us in the park earlier, he just used words with me. “Hey,” he said again. “I might not know what happens next—that was always your territory—but I
will
help you however I can.”

I
f I needed help, it was the sort that might make me feel better about my head being so broken. I knew what Jarrod was trying to do, though. I knew he was trying to give me whatever parts of myself he could—to help put Humpty Dumpty back together again—but everyone knows the end of that story. It doesn't really work out.

At that point, I just hoped I might someday look inside myself and not feel like I was staring into a long, empty hallway. At that point, I wanted the clutter of memories. Good or even bad ones, it didn't matter. I just wanted to feel like there was something to me. Something real I could hold on to.

There
was
something, of course; I just couldn't see it. I was as invisible to myself as I was to anyone. I'd have to make myself seeable, then, I decided. And to do that, I'd have to start making new memories instead of worrying about the ones I was missing.

So when Jarrod invited me to a party he wanted to throw for Halloween, I said yes without hesitating. “Yes,” I said, nodding once, firmly, like I'd just made a huge decision. And then, after thinking about it a second longer, I asked, “Who else is coming?”

We were in the cafeteria for lunch period. Around us, people were talking and laughing, filling the room with the voices of their incredibly normal lives, lives that all of them could remember with great ease. But at our table in an out-of-the-way corner, everyone felt far away, as if they were on other planets, and we were on a moon base, orbiting at a distance.

“Just a few of the guys from the team,” Jarrod said. He took a bite of his pizza, then nodded at someone who was walking by our table behind me.

I looked over my shoulder, and sure enough, it was one of the guys from the team. Patrick Morrison. I hadn't held a conversation with Patrick Morrison since the sixth or seventh grade, most likely, and whenever our eyes met now, it was like he looked right through me.

Great,
I thought.
A party. A party with people who don't acknowledge my existence.

My instinct was to bolt, to just not go in the end, then apologize for not showing up later. But since it was clear to me by then that I couldn't trust my own instincts, I just nodded and said, “Cool,” and hoped it sounded like I meant it.

On Halloween morning, as I spooned up oatmeal at the kitchen table before heading off to school, my mom looked over her shoulder as she washed dishes and said, “Hey, if he's not busy tonight, why don't you bring Jarrod over for dinner?”

I swallowed the mound of oatmeal I'd just shoveled into my mouth before shaking my head and saying, “No can do. There's a Halloween party tonight.”

“A party?” my mom said, and her eyes lit up like she couldn't believe what I was saying. “I don't think I've ever heard that word leave your mouth before.”

I wasn't sure if my own mother had just cut me down for not being the type of person who got invited to parties, so instead of rolling my eyes at her, I just shrugged and said, “Yeah. At Jarrod's.”

“At Jarrod's?” she said, her voice going up into even higher frequencies of disbelief. Now that her initial shock had passed, she began to shake her head. “In that old trailer? I can't see how any party, at least a good one, can be thrown in that place.”

“Well, it's just a small party,” I said, as if I knew anything about it. “Me, a few guys from the baseball team, maybe some people from his classes.”

“Girls?” my mom asked, turning back to the sink. A dish squeaked as she wiped it with a wet cloth, and I flinched at the sound of it.

“I don't know,” I said. “It's not my party. He just invited me.”

“Well, he must be trying to make friends again,” my mom said as she set the dish in the drying rack. “Parties will do the trick, for sure. But don't do anything stupid, okay? First sign of alcohol or drugs, you get out of there.”

“Mom,” I said, looking up from my just-emptied bowl. “I don't think he's going to have alcohol or drugs in his mom's place after what she went through to get off them.”

“You never know,” my mom said, shaking her head. “Just because his poor mother had trouble with all that and got over it doesn't mean
he's
not going to have his own troubles. Sometimes these things run in families.”

I dropped my spoon in the bowl and stood to bring it to her, let it slide into the soapy water and clunk against the sink's bottom. “Did you dream that,” I asked, looking straight into her eyes, “or is that a genuinely concerned opinion?” There was an edge to my voice that surprised even me.

My mom's eyes turned to slits in an instant. “Don't you talk to me that way, young man,” she said. “I'm just trying to look out for you. It's my job, you know. Being a mother isn't easy.”

“I'm seventeen,” I said. “I can look out for myself.” Then I grabbed my backpack from my chair, thudded down the mudroom steps, and opened the back door.

As I stood there with the door still open behind me, my mom got in one last jab. “You think you know everything, Aidan Lockwood,” she yelled from the kitchen, “but you don't know the half of it.”

I shut the door on her voice and shook my head at what she'd said. “ ‘Sometimes these things run in families,' ” I whispered into the morning air, as if by saying the words aloud and scoffing at them, I might exorcise the idea they held in their syllables. The idea that none of us can escape the problems of our families.

The words turned into a white fog in front of me as soon as I said them, chilled by the late-autumn air. They turned into a fog as thick and white as the one inside me. Then they disappeared.

For the rest of the day, whenever I looked up from a test or away from my teachers, the clock seemed to have moved far into the future instead of keeping the usual school-like time of never-going-to-end. Before I knew it, the day was half over. And in what seemed like the next moment, the bell for last period rang, and I was walking out the doors.

Some people had dressed up because it was Halloween, so it had been a day of costume watching. There was a lineup of mostly bad Lady Gaga renditions and guys wearing plastic claws with their hair slicked up to look like Wolverine. One girl came as Catwoman, wearing a black leather bodysuit, twirling a fake plastic whip like a tail, which got her sent home by the end of first period. A bunch of the school athletes unimaginatively wore their team uniforms. And some teachers managed to get into the spirit. Mr. Johnson was wearing breeches and tights in an effort to look like Shakespeare, and Ms. Woodyard wore a severe nunlike costume that she continually had to explain was a replica of the garb women might have worn at the Salem witch trials. At the end of the day, all of these masked spirits exited the building together, as if in a parade, then drove off in a hurry toward their various Halloween destinations.

Jarrod was already leaning against the Blue Bomb when I got outside. It was weird to see him not smoking an after-school cigarette; apparently, that image of him had been branded into my mind. I think it must have been weird for him, too, because he jiggled his leg up and down and kept playing with a lock of his hair like it really needed his attention. The only time I'd seen him look so nervous was when he took me to Mill Creek to show me one of his memories. One of
my
memories, that is. One of
our
memories, I should say.

“What?” I said as I came up to him, as if just last week he hadn't told me any of those completely unbelievable things. “No costume? Really?”

He looked me up and down before he said, “You're one to talk. Jeans and a flannel shirt? Again? One easily purchased hockey mask and you would have been a hit today, so don't go giving me a hard time.”

“On Halloween,” I said, “at least originally, masks were supposed to come off, according to Mr. Johnson. But we are for sure the least fun people in this high school regardless. Even Ms. Woodyard came dressed for the Salem witch trials.”

“Huh,” said Jarrod. “I thought that pilgrim dress was one of her regular outfits.”

I grinned, and was relieved to be grinning. Jarrod and I had begun to understand each other's sense of humor—dry and cutting, in his case—which meant we were getting back to being the way we must have been when we were kids, when we'd understood one another in some way that made us want to be around each other. To be friends.

“Need to pick up anything for the party?” I asked. “We have time if you're not ready.”

“Nah,” Jarrod said, shaking his head. “I've got everything we need. We can head out if you're ready.”

“Ready,” I said, confident as a businessman, even though I had no clue what the fine print on the contract said.

So we got into the Blue Bomb and headed toward the trailer on Cordial Run, where, when Jarrod unlocked the front door and pushed inside, the door squealing on its hinges, I found the place in what must have been the cleanest state it had been in since we were kids.

The shock must have shown on my face, because Jarrod said, “My mom said I had to clean if I was going to have people over. I told her it was just you coming, but she said that didn't matter.” He looked at me after saying that and laughed at his own joke.

“What a guy,” I said, and shook my head at him. I'd gotten snagged, though, on what he'd said about it being just me coming, and wondered what had happened to the others. “Didn't you invite anyone else?” I asked. “You said some of the team were coming over.”

Jarrod made a face like the guys on the team were some exotic food he'd never try willingly. Octopus or raw fish, maybe. But baseball players? “Nah,” he said. “I'll have to hang out with them soon enough, once we start spring training. I figured we could have one of our old horror-flick-marathon nights, like we used to. For old time's sake.”

I looked at him for a while, wanting to say I wasn't comfortable with this change in plans, wanting to say I wasn't comfortable doing something we did back when we were kids, because doing that would make me think about all of the
other
things I couldn't remember us doing.