The Boy and Girl Who Broke the World Read online

  What I’m not quite sure about is if this general suckiness of people is just a regional thing, or global. I wouldn’t know, since I’ve never spent much time outside Fog Harbor. Apparently, there are rich kids who travel to places like Europe and the Caribbean on a semi-regular basis and go on African safaris. I’ve only been to Seattle three times that I can remember. My interactions with people there mostly involved restaurant staff, and those people were not promising. The majority of people are like restaurant staff when you think about it. If they’re nice to you, it’s probably fake and because they want something (like a good tip).

  I have spent the last seventeen—almost eighteen—years perfecting my stay-away-from-me-or-you’ll-get-stabbed look, but apparently this goofy-looking, mop-haired, skinny white boy currently taking a seat across from me is blind. I glare at him, and he just grins like he’s some bad actor in a toothpaste commercial, except his teeth belong nowhere near a toothpaste commercial. Not that I’m judging. I’ve never been to a dentist either.

  “Hi, I’m Billy,” he says.

  “What do you want?” I say.

  “Are you new? Do you need someone to show you around?”

  “Billy is the name of a little boy.”

  “Or a pet goat.”

  “Did you mean to be funny?”

  “No.”

  “Then that means I’m laughing at you, not with you.”

  “What’s your name?” he says without a beat, as if he didn’t even hear my obvious insult.

  “Lydia.”

  “I’ve never met anyone named Lydia,” he says.

  “That’s because we’re usually chain-smoking old women.”

  “I know a lot of chain-smoking old women.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Are you Quillalish?” he says. Predictable. Everyone asks me that. Like inquiring about the source of someone’s skin color is an appropriate way to start a conversation.

  “No, I’m Martian,” I say. “Are you?”

  “No, I’m from Earth. Are you from Carthage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Welcome!”

  This kid Billy is a certifiable weirdo. Hypothetically, I might like weirdos. But so far, I don’t think I’ve ever met a real, true weirdo. Only the posers pretending to be weirdos because they think it’s cool, those girls in pink sweatpants with fake rips and stains with that god-awful band’s name printed on the butt from that god-awful Sizzling Subject store in the Fog Harbor Mall.

  “What’s your last name?” I say.

  “Sloat.”

  “Your name is Billy Sloat?”

  “Yep.”

  “What an unfortunate name. Do people ever call you—”

  “Hey, Billy Goat!” shouts a large crew-cutted mouth breather as he slaps Billy hard on the back. The table shakes. Billy accidentally squeezes his juice box, and piss-colored apple juice erupts out of the straw.

  “Hi, Grayson,” says Billy as he mops up his spilled apple juice with a crumpled napkin. “How was your summer?”

  “Whatever, doofus,” the mouth breather grunts as he walks away. Then he shouts, “Unicorns rule!” and half of the lunchroom cheers.

  “How long have you been putting up with that?” I say, surprised by a sudden, even-stronger-than-usual impulse to clobber the retreating baby-man.

  “Pretty much since the day I was born,” Billy says, attempting to clean apple juice off his shirt, but all he manages to do is spread ripped wads of napkin all over. He is some kind of rare alien species that appears to not get embarrassed. He may be worthy of further study.

  “What’s your deal, Billy Goat?”

  He pauses his sad attempts at cleaning his shirt, looks up at me, and blinks earnestly. “I have an artistic temperament with no particular artistic talent,” he says with no hint of sarcasm.

  “Tragic,” I say.

  He just shrugs.

  “Stop what you’re doing,” I say, reaching over the table with a clean napkin. “Dab—don’t wipe.” I position the napkin on the wet stain on his shirt, just over his heart, and apply pressure. I can feel his heart beating in my fingers. For a few seconds, he seems to stop breathing. And for some reason the thought pops into my head—I wonder, when was the last time he was touched?—and a weird warmness spreads through me.

  I lean back quickly, suddenly wanting to get as far away from him as possible.

  “Thank you,” he says with a wide-eyed look on his face, like he might start crying any second. What have I done? I can’t think of anything snarky to say back. Only the first day of school and already I’m losing my edge.

  The thunder of students grows outside the lunchroom. It’s almost time for the official start of what will undoubtedly be another miserable year. Same shit, different surroundings. The bell rings. All the kids make their annoying kid noises.

  “It was nice meeting you,” Billy says.

  “I’m in the witness protection program,” I say, gathering my things. “I can’t have friends. I’m a danger to you and your family.”

  “Well, can I have your phone number anyway?” he says.

  “Are you going to try to tell me about Jesus?”

  “No.”

  “Fine. I’ll text it to you.”

  “I don’t have a cell phone.”

  “Your parents must not love you.”

  “My parents are dead.”

  “Mine too,” I half-lie.

  “You say even weirder stuff than I do,” Billy says.

  “Thanks,” I say. I scribble my number on the one surviving napkin not drenched with apple juice. “Bye, Billy Goat,” I say as I hand it to him, and I grab my backpack and walk away before he has the chance to say anything else. I feel wobbly and weak, like maybe I’m getting sick. I’m exhausted in a strange new way.

  That may have been the longest conversation I’ve had in years.

  BILLY

  THAT GIRL LYDIA GAVE ME her phone number, so I’m pretty sure that makes our friendship official. It’s not even a fake number. I know because I checked as soon as I got home from school by calling her, and when I said, “Hi, it’s Billy!” she said, “Dude, take it easy!” so I knew it was her for sure. Grandma’s always telling me one of the main reasons people don’t like me is because I’m too eager, but maybe this time it’s actually working out for me. It’s not like that time in eighth grade when I asked Alice Comstock for her number, but when I called it, I got some answering service that said, “You’ve been dissed!” and played fart noises, and when I asked her about it the next day, she just started laughing, and her friends started laughing, and they wouldn’t stop laughing, so I just walked away and learned from the experience that maybe I shouldn’t ask people for their phone numbers anymore, though obviously I didn’t learn my lesson.

  After I called Lydia, I turned on the AA channel. There was my favorite alcoholic, Lynn A., sitting in her usual spot and nodding sagely as a woman shared about relapsing on mouthwash after seventeen years sober. “I made a friend today, Lynn,” I told her, and I swear she winked at me.

  Something happened when Lydia pushed that napkin down on my heart. Something I can’t explain. It’s like she found some secret button that reset the world. Not just my world, but the whole world. Grandma always says I exaggerate stuff, and maybe she’s right, but I know something happened, something bigger than me and bigger than Lydia. It felt like the whole earth took a big inhale, and everything was frozen for a minute while it held its breath, and then when it exhaled, it’s like it messed up gravity and jumbled us all up with it. And even though I’ve never gotten anything better than a C in science, I still understand the basic idea that sometimes when you add one thing to a different kind of thing, it can create a totally new thing that looks nothing like the things that made it, and that new thing can start a chain reaction that does all kinds of surprising stuff all over the place, and I think maybe Lydia and me are like that, like our meeting has created some weird chemical reaction that’s going to
turn everything wonderful, except instead of chemicals it’s magic or something, and when you think about it, magic is just science no one’s figured out yet.

  So I guess it feels a little anticlimactic now to be sitting here on this faded, stained couch, watching TV with Grandma like usual after one of the most unusual days of my life, but I’m choosing to focus on the positive and not waste my feelings on disappointment.

  It’s Monday, which means it’s Sexy Sober Survivor night, which is Grandma’s favorite show, which means she might throw the remote control at my head like the last time I made the mistake of talking during it. It’s a show where fashion models go to rehab, except the rehab is on a deserted island and they have to break down and cry and/or tell sordid stories from their pasts and/or tell sordid stories from another contestant’s past, to get the clue to lead them to food. And also, they’re naked the whole time.

  It’s an interesting show for obvious reasons, but I find it kind of awkward to be interested in it for those reasons in the company of my grandmother, so when it’s on, I try to think of something else. For instance, during the last episode, I tried not to look at the screen while the contestants splashed water on each other while bathing in a river; instead, I wondered whose job it is to put all those black bars on their interesting parts, and how they get the bars to move around so fast when the girls are running away from crocodiles and hornet swarms and bouncing around in the water, but then I inevitably started thinking about what’s under those black bars, and then things got awkward again, and I had to excuse myself and go upstairs to my room and hope, as I always hope when going upstairs, that this won’t be the time the house decides to finally collapse on top of me, burying me in a heap of rubble, and the whole time I’m waiting for the firefighters to dig me out, the most pressing thing on my mind will be how am I going to hide my boner when my arms are pinned under this thousand-pound beam?

  I’m grateful we’re not watching Sexy Sober Survivor right now, just the local evening news. Grandma has her feet on my lap because she’s supposed to elevate them according to something she read on the Internet, which is basically her doctor since she can’t afford a real one. I’m looking at the TV screen with what I’m hoping looks like an interested expression on my face, but mostly I’m just trying really hard not to look down because Grandma’s ankles are so swollen, they’re about as big around as a loaf of bread, and there are blue squiggly veins and pink splotches all over them and crusty white skin peeling off, and quite frankly they scare me.

  I wonder how much of my life I spend trying not to look at stuff. Not Grandma’s feet. Not Sexy Sober Survivor. Not in the eyes of the bullies at school. Not at the various scabby guys lying around town who are hopefully sleeping but might be dead. Maybe you could call this denial, but I call it choosing positivity.

  The guy on TV is talking about how excited everyone is for the school year to start, but Grandma’s just shaking her head back and forth the way she does when she yells, “Can you believe this liberal media crap?” because she thinks the fancy news people in Seattle are so out of touch about how “real people” live. I don’t quite understand Grandma’s idea that living in a town with no jobs makes us more “real” than other people, but I certainly understand that the people on TV live very different lives than me and Grandma and most of the people in Rome and Carthage and all of Fog Harbor County do, and the news they’re talking about isn’t usually about our lives. Maybe in Seattle people are actually excited about the school year starting like the news guy said, because they live in a world where people get excited about stuff, while we live in a world where everything seems to happen for the sole purpose of pissing Grandma off.

  “Billy,” Grandma says. “Rub my feet, will you?”

  “Okay, Grandma,” I say. I move my hands to her feet without looking. I feel my way around the warm moistness of her skin.

  It could be so much worse.

  I say this to myself several times a day. The phrase calms me.

  It could be so much worse.

  The therapy talk shows I like to watch after school are always saying the key to happiness is gratitude. Even people with the worst lives can be happy if they remember to be grateful for what they have. So I remind myself there are far worse ways to be an orphan. I could be in a foster home where I’d have to share a bedroom with ten other kids, with maniacs for parents who steal my foster-kid money for drugs and feed me dog food. Grandma could be a raging alcoholic, or a junkie like my mom (RIP). She could be fast enough to chase me around the house with a belt. I could be living on the streets. I could be sold into slavery. My house could collapse on top of me, and I could die with a boner caused by Sexy Sober Survivor, and firefighters would find me and my boner under the rubble too late, and even though it’s tragic for a kid to die, they’d laugh about me to each other in secret for the rest of their lives, and that would be my legacy.

  I take a deep breath. It could be so much worse.

  The thing is, Grandma doesn’t have to keep me. She could have kicked me out a long time ago, like she did my uncle Caleb, and he’s her actual son. Sometimes I get scared that she’s finally had enough and is sick of buying me food, but that’s when I try to make myself extra useful. So far, this strategy has worked. As long as she needs me, I can stay.

  Maybe not every newly minted high school senior has to massage his grandmother’s swollen, discolored feet, but I choose to focus on the bright side. I only got shoved inside a locker twice last year, so things are definitely improving. The guidance counselor says I show an aptitude for customer service and rule-following, so if I don’t become a heroin or meth addict or get anyone pregnant in the next few years, I can aspire to a promising future as a shift manager at a chain restaurant or big-box store at the Fog Harbor Mall. And they’re always hiring at BigMart.

  Grandma told me once that my optimism is a mental illness. But one of my favorite TV therapist’s tagline is “Happiness is a choice,” so I think the fact that I keep choosing it actually means I’m extra sane.

  In addition to therapy talk shows, my other favorite thing to watch is the twenty-four-hour AA meeting channel. The meeting room has a bunch of posters on the wall with all these great slogans on them. I used to have a notebook where I’d write them over and over again whenever I felt sad, kind of like when I’d get in trouble in elementary school and as a punishment, the teacher would make me write a hundred times, “I will not hide in the bathroom at recess” or “I will not eat food out of the garbage can.” I like “One Day at a Time,” and “Progress, Not Perfection,” and “Keep It Simple, Stupid,” but my all-time favorite is “Fake It Till You Make It,” because it means all I have to do is pretend I’m happy and eventually it’ll stick.

  Lynn A. is this old lady who I swear is sitting in the same seat next to the coffee maker every time I turn on the channel, with her bluish-white fluffy hair and colorful sweaters, looking like Mrs. Santa, constantly knitting some kind of scarf with a serene look on her face, like even a nuclear bomb couldn’t make her stop smiling. I’ve known her pretty much my whole life. Lynn A. has been sober for forty-three years, and now she just lives in this AA meeting on TV, and every now and then she’ll tell the story about how she used to be a prostitute who lived in a van by the river and her liver was the size of a basketball and she was vomiting blood all the time, and she’ll give a big speech about how she’s found the keys to the kingdom of Heaven, and she knows a new freedom and a new happiness, and she doesn’t regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it, and she comprehends the word “serenity” and she knows peace, and feelings of uselessness and self-pity have slipped away, and she’s lost interest in selfish things and gained interest in her fellows, and her whole outlook on life has changed, and she’s not afraid of anything anymore, and she always knows what the right thing to do is, and no matter how many times she says this I get excited every time, and I feel it in my whole body, and it feels like the truth, or at least what I want the truth to loo
k like, and I want exactly what she has.

  Ever since I was little, every time Grandma or someone at school would do something mean to me, I’d wait until Grandma went to bed and sneak into the living room to watch the AA channel and pretend Lynn A. was my real-life grandma and Grandma was just my nightmare grandma, and I swear she’d look right through the TV directly into my eyes and smile at me, and it would make me feel better every time, and for a second I could believe I was in that room with all those people sitting in a circle talking about their feelings and clapping for each other’s bravery and handing each other tissues when they cried, and Lynn A. would be holding my hand and I’d get to stay there inside the TV for the rest of my life, just like her.

  I honestly don’t know who I’d be if it weren’t for cable television.

  LYDIA

  IT’S HOODIE WEATHER TODAY, OVERCAST but not raining, so I’m taking advantage of the dry roads and skateboarding the three miles home from work. It’s after eight, but the sun isn’t anywhere close to setting, like nature hasn’t gotten the memo yet that school started and summer hours are supposed to end. The one thing Carthage has going for it is that it’s flat and easy to skate, though most of the year it’s usually too rainy. There’s something peaceful and almost beautiful about the long, empty road that winds around the seashore, past the old docks and caved-in shacks, the rocky beaches sharp with barnacles, with their monuments of driftwood and old tires. But look closer and you see plastic bags and garbage hanging from mud-spattered blackberry vines, dumped mattresses and TVs on the side of the road in front of the impenetrable wall of mossy, dripping, mosquito-infested rain forest. My home—one big, wet garbage dump.