100 Sideways Miles (22 page)

I instinctively moved my hand to try grabbing anything so I might steady myself, but there was nothing to hold on to.

It is the story of my life.

And everything vaporized into the nameless chaos of my twenty-miles-per-second universe.

Why would I even care about it?

I have a dim recollection of something I doubted could be real. It was this: I wondered why Cade Hernandez and Julia were running toward me, away from where they'd been standing, asking me something—if I was okay.

And following my friends, I believed I saw Marjorie and Mazie Curtis—the girls who'd been killed in William Mulholland's 1928 flood.

Shadow puppets.

The words were all evaporating at the time, but I was certain in my mind that ghosts had been there in the prison with us all along.

Imagine that.

Crazy.

Look: How can I ever describe the wordless universe I enter at times like these, and do it on paper, using words?

There's one for the books.

I know this: First, I smelled flowers. Cade and Julia drifted toward me, down the trash-strewn and swirling corridor, followed by two shadow puppets. Maybe they were just the shadows of my own scattered atoms. The flower smell got thicker, almost sickening. I looked up and saw the outline of a horse lying on its side, suspended in the mesh net of chain-link overhead.

Here I come, Caballito!

One hundred sideways miles, Finn, and
splat!

Was it a horse?

Everything waved lazily, the fluttering fingers of sea anemones fanned by back-and-forth warm-water currents.

It was all so beautiful, and in a moment none of it had a name.

If you could feel every atom in your body simultaneously release its grip on its neighbors, expand outward so that each particle becomes a new center in the universe, it would feel exactly like this.

Twenty miles per second, twenty miles per second.

Later, when I came back together, Julia told me that I had blanked out for about eighty-four-thousand miles—seventy minutes or so.

It was a long and quiet trip.

Somehow I'd ended up on my back, because I found myself staring straight up at all the junk floating in the sky.

Here is another thing about my seizures: Coming back hurts. It hurts a hell of a lot.

As usual, I was very mad.

Look: I lay there, eyes fixed open on the net above me, wondering what it was, marveling at the beautiful honeycomb pattern of narrow lines. It looked like I was staring into the compound lens on the eye of an insect. The sideways horse no longer floated above me—it could not have been there in the first place—but I still didn't have words for the things I saw suspended in the air beneath the third tier.

Words come back so slowly. It is always like that.

Julia and Cade kneeled over me. Cade pressed something soft against the side of my head. It stung.

“Get the fuck off me,” I said.

I was never very nice at times like this.

Laika had curled up between my hand and my hip, waiting for me to come back, like she always did when I blanked out.

Laika was a very patient dog.

“Where the fuck did you go?” I said.

Cade shook his head. “Where did
you
go? There's no signal in here. I tried to call your dad.”

“Stupid. Don't do that.”

Cade Hernandez shrugged. “Doesn't matter, dude. No signal.”

“Uh.”

I stared and stared. Desk. Chair. Pants. Paper.

Two shadow puppets: The boy on my baseball team and my girlfriend.

Cade Hernandez. Left-handed pitcher.

Julia Bishop.

Twenty miles.

Twenty miles.

Everything hurt so much. My head pounded, and all down my spine it felt as though my bones had been churned to broken shards of glass.

I said, “I'm okay.”

Slowly, I became aware that I had legs, feet, hands. They shook, just like you would shiver if you were submerged in icy water, but I knew it wasn't cold.

I wondered if I pissed myself.

I couldn't move my hand to check if my shorts were wet. My
arms were not connected yet. But I was thinly comforted by the foggy memory of having pissed into an old concrete toilet with Cade Hernandez in what looked like a demolished locker room.

Was any of it real?

I stared at Julia. I tried to see if there was something she could tell me with her eyes—if I was okay, or if I'd pissed myself again, or maybe I was lying there with a goddamned hard-on pitching a circus big top in my shorts. I could see Julia Bishop was scared about something.

Cade pressed and pressed his hand against the side of my head.

“You cut your head,” he said.

“Fuck that.”

I felt my fingers rake through the greasy spines of Laika's fur.

“Is it bad?” I asked.

Cade pulled his fingers away and leaned in closer. He said, “I don't know. You probably need stitches.”

I watched a bead of sweat roll downward from Cade's armpit and turn along the curve of his chest. It was Cade's own shirt he used to press against the cut, which was just at the base of my skull behind my right ear. I could tell it was Cade's shirt; I could smell his atoms on it.

“No fucking way am I going to get stitches,” I said.

I swore an awful lot after seizures.

I was always so rebellious whenever I came back from my trips. Nobody likes coming back from vacation, right? But I didn't want my father to find out, which is what would happen if I ended up in some emergency room getting my head sewn shut.

Then I said, “Where the fuck are we, Cade?”

Cade Hernandez turned away from me. I could hear him spit a big stream of tobacco juice down onto the dirty concrete.

Splat!

I shivered and shivered.

• • •

After a seizure, I usually need to sleep for twelve hours or so, just to give my atoms a chance to settle in and hold hands again like good neighbors.

It wasn't going to happen this time.

Cade examined the cut on my head one more time. He said, “It looks like it stopped bleeding.”

“Sorry about your shirt.”

“No worries,” Cade said. He winked at me.

Cade Hernandez stood up and then kicked his way through the garbage on the floor, down the corridor toward the toilets.

“Toilet paper,” Cade said. “Got to find stuff to use for toilet paper. Pooing without toilet paper is fucking ridiculous.”

Cade Hernandez was gone for about fifteen minutes—eighteen-thousand miles.

And we heard him scream.

Clearly, it was a case of Cade being Cade.

By the time he came back, Julia had helped me sit up with my back propped against a cell door. I was groggy.

“It sounded like you were dying in there,” I said.

“Dude, it was like having twins. Ridiculous.”

That was Cade Hernandez.

We had to get back to Burnt Mill Creek. Cade was scheduled to work that night at Flat Face Pizza.

• • •

The walk back was slow and difficult for me, but I wouldn't say anything about it to Cade and Julia.

We had torn a square of fabric out of Cade's T-shirt, and I kept my hand pressed against it until the blood dried and the cloth bandage stuck to my head. It was going to be a real bitch getting that thing off.

Before we left, Cade Hernandez threw what was left of his bloody shirt down in the trash at Aberdeen Lake State Penitentiary. Who wants to wear a shirt soaked in some other kid's blood?

I offered to give him my own T-shirt, but he said no because he couldn't think up anything new to name my emoticon scar.

I conceded that two names in one day would be expecting a little too much, even from a left-handed artistic genius like Cade Hernandez.

He let Julia and me sit together in the backseat for the ride home to Burnt Mill Creek, and told me I should take a shower at his house so my mom and dad wouldn't—in his words—think I looked like such a fucking bloody mess.

“Thanks, Cade,” I said. “Maybe I
will
hang out with you at Flat Face tonight.”

I didn't want to go home.

I thought I'd be able to sleep in the car, but all the words that had come back swirled with nervous worry inside me. Everything was changing; I was afraid to make the wrong decision about choices in the miles ahead of me. It was like Cade Hernandez's roller-coaster waiting line: Here I was at the front, uncertain about whether or not I'd get on board. I
leaned my head against Julia Bishop's perfect shoulder.

As we wound south through the canyon toward Julia's house, the sun dipped down and the shadows of the mountains stretched their cloaks across the snaking roadway.

And Julia Bishop said this: “I am not going back to school next month.”

“What?”

Cade said, “Are you dropping out?”

She said, “I'm going back home.”

“Yeah,” Cade answered, “it's about four miles that way.”

“What?” I said again.

“I didn't know when to tell you,” Julia said. “My parents want me to come home. Back to Chicago.”

If I was ever the kind of guy who punched things, I would have put my fist through something—anything—maybe Cade's window. But I'm not the kind of guy who punches things. I'm the kind of guy who sucks all his shitty life inside his personal black hole and pretends everything is perfectly fine.