I was choking now, and I had no choice left. I expectorated into the sink, spraying the whole basin with aquamarine spittle. There was toothpaste on the fixture and the hot and cold handles. We both looked down. Meredith started laughing. I couldn’t help it this time; I laughed, too. I tried to disguise it by turning on the water, but I was still chuckling as the paste washed away. Meredith kept giggling as she finished with her own teeth.
“Well,” she said when she was finished, “it’s been a pleasure watching you do disgusting things with your mouth, Sebastian.”
She made a move toward the door.
“Wait,” I said.
“Yes?”
“Have you actually drawn out the poster?”
She nodded.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay what?”
“I’d like to see it.”
We walked together across the kitchen to her room. Sitting on the bed was a full-color poster with our band name in bright red, with Band-Aids stuck to it. The letters were shaded so they looked like they were coming right off the page. And the Band-Aids looked like they’d been covering a bleeding wound. Underneath the name was the time and location of the show in simple black letters. I took in the whole thing. It looked professional, like the album posters in the window of The Record Collector.
“I didn’t know you could really draw,” I said.
“Just lettering and stuff. I can’t do faces or anything.”
“This is incredible,” I said.
“Tell Jared you did it.”
I looked her in the eyes.
“I can’t take the credit for this,” I said.
“He’ll never use it if he thinks it’s mine,” she said.
She handed me the poster. “Jared has some money up there somewhere,” she said. “I’ve seen him counting it. This time he foots the bill.”
I held the poster delicately between my thumb and forefinger. She had drawn it on thick paper, but I didn’t want it to wrinkle or tear. I held it at my side as I left the room.
“Hey,” she said when I was out in the kitchen. “I’m sorry about last night, okay? But if you’re going to be mad at me forever, then just shove it up your ass.”
She shut her door before I could accept or unaccept what I guessed to be an apology. She left me in the kitchen with her artwork. So I walked back upstairs and waited until Janice was finished with her meeting. Then I slipped in and made my petition to Jared. He seemed skeptical at first, but I knew there was no way he could veto the poster. It was too good. I had seen his drawings in his songwriting notebook and they were crude childish things. This one made us appear like a real band. It suggested what we wanted most: professional credibility.
In the end he only had one addition. And he didn’t even tell me what it was ahead of time. He just went to his small desk, grabbed a marker, and wrote something else at the bottom of the poster.
“There,” he said. “Now it’s a good poster.”
Jared smiled and dropped it on his bed. There were two new words written under the talent show information. Block letters. All caps. They read:
FREE BEER!
27.
Weightless on the Ground
EACH ONE OF US IS THE CENTER OF OUR OWN UNIVERSE. That’s the only way it can be. From our point of view, we are stationary and everything else is swirling around us, dropping into our lives just for our reaction. This isn’t true in a scientific sense, but Fuller said it was how things really feel when we’re alive every day. That’s why it’s easy to forget about things that don’t directly revolve around us. War. Famine. Everything else we’re too self-absorbed to ponder. For me, the major element that had escaped my orbit recently was Nana. Sure, she existed somewhere back in the abandoned wings of my memory, but I was trying my best to keep her locked there during my stay with the Whitcombs. To think about her daily, and about what I had done, was too painful.
I had been successful at blocking her out, of recent, but that didn’t mean she would disappear completely. And it didn’t mean that everyone else was keeping Nana shut away, too. I realized these things fully the next evening after dinner. There were two days left before the contest, and as I cleared the table, I was already thinking about band practice. Meredith was rinsing plates for the dishwasher, and each time I brought a new load from the table, she greeted me with a small closed-lip smile. I piled the dishes in the sink beneath her, and tried not to catch any mist from the spray head.
My orbit was very small that night. Nearly everything was happening in my head. I wasn’t much aware of the external, so when Janice touched me on the shoulder, I was brought back to reality in a rush. I dropped a bowl of green beans and the stray leftovers bounced off the carpet like grasshoppers. The bowl stayed in one piece.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“That’s okay.”
I bent down to scoop up my mess, one bean at a time. She hesitated for a second, watching me, but I could tell she had something else to say. She came out with it when all the beans were back in their bowl.
“I’d like to go for a walk if that’s okay with you.”
I looked up at her from below. Her smile slackened.
“Of course,” I said.
“You can leave the rest for Meredith,” she said.
She took the bowl gently from my hands and rested it back on the table. Only minutes ago we had all been joking at the table over a story Meredith told about dissecting cows’ eyes in her biology class. That levity was completely gone now.
“Jared’s waiting upstairs for his lesson,” I said.
“He can keep waiting,” she said.
I followed her to the closet by the front door and donned my coat. I was wearing Jared’s pants again, so I pulled my socks up this time before stepping out into the cold. I stuffed my hands in my pockets. It was getting dark early now, and even though I had noticed this before, I was surprised anew when Janice and I stood on the porch.
“Oh,” she said, just after stepping out, “look at that.”
I looked where she was pointing and saw a small metal angel lying on the smooth concrete of the porch. We both glanced up. The angel had come unclasped from the wind chime. Janice scooped it up with a mittened hand and held it up to try to reattach it, but it was broken. She eventually surrendered the metal silhouette to her jacket pocket. The other angels held still on their rungs. They did not clang. Janice stepped off the porch and hiked toward the sidewalk. I caught up to her and walked by her side.
We didn’t speak for the first couple of blocks. She took faster strides than I did, walking with a contagious sense of purpose, and I felt myself scrambling to keep up. The air was misty. Not enough to really affect my vision, but just enough to make the streets I’d only recently walked with Meredith seem a touch unfamiliar. The trees disappeared into a gray broth of sky at the top, so it was hard to tell how high they went up. It could have been miles. I was looking up when Mrs. Whitcomb finally started talking.
“I’ve been asking myself a lot of questions lately, Sebastian,” she said.
She kept walking, just a step ahead of me.
“What kind of questions?” I asked.
“Questions about a lot of things. But mostly about you.”
I started to feel a little anxious. And I had the irrational thought that I wouldn’t be returning to the Whitcombs’ house after this walk. I was sure of it suddenly, and I felt the urge to turn around and sprint back.
“I’ve been asking myself what my intentions are. And if . . . I’m really helping you at all.”
I felt my feet clapping the sidewalk. I was starting to speed up.
“Well, you shouldn’t have . . . doubts about that, Mrs. Whitcomb,” I said, faster than I wanted to. “You’ve done so much. I can’t even tell you.”
She listened to me, but I could tell she was not going to be pushed from her intended path. She waited for me to cease talking, and picked up where she had left off.
“I had always thought I could do something for you. I wanted to reunite you with your grandmother, and help you find a way to work through your difficulties. I thought I could do it. But I forgot all about that for a while. I was distracted. I’ve been so distracted lately. And it was good to see you and Jared so close.”
She was quiet a moment, possibly imagining Jared and me together.
“But I need to wake up,” she said. “I’ve been in this kind of
trance
the past few years, just letting everything happen to me. I need to trust myself to make some decisions, even if they’re hard ones. Maybe I’m not explaining this very well, but it’s what I’ve been thinking about.”
I started to formulate a response to all this in my head. But before I could utter something out loud, she leveled me.
“I met with your grandmother,” she said.
I waited for the information to set in. But it didn’t really. I found myself unable to imagine the circumstances in which this would have happened.
“You went to my house?” I said.
“I did,” she said. “I’ve been trying to call for the last week, but she never picks up. The one time she did, she called me some unpleasant names without even listening to me. So I drove over and knocked on her door.
Your
door.”
I still couldn’t picture it. I couldn’t see Nana springing to life from her bed and coming to answer. I couldn’t see her inviting Janice in.
“Your house is a map of the world now, Sebastian. Did you know that?”
“The Geoscope,” I said. “Is it completed?”
“I think so,” she said. “She told me she was planning a second coat on a few countries, but that was basically it. It looked like a real globe. It was breathtaking in its own way, really. An accomplishment.”
We were a good five blocks from the Whitcomb house now. Everything behind us was encased in brume. The mist felt cold on my exposed skin.
“She misses you,” said Janice. “She wants you to come home.”
“She said that?”
Janice touched me again. This time on the back. I felt a lump rising in my throat. Suddenly, it dawned on me why Nana would have let her in the dome. Me. She was hoping for some information about me. She had gotten to the point where she would welcome strangers into our house to see if they knew anything.
“She never really intended for you to leave,” said Janice. “Maybe for an afternoon. She told me that her moods have been uncontrollable. And she told me about the newspaper article. It hurt her more than you could believe, Sebastian. She felt like her whole life had been called fraudulent. Like all her ambitions had been trampled in that moment.”
I thought back to that day. Her exhausted eyes. Her crumpled body under the blanket, sitting on the dirty ground. I tried to shake the image free.
“I’ll be going back to a world of isolation,” I said. “You know that, right? That’s where she’s asking me to return. That’s what . . . you’re asking.”
Janice stopped walking. We were all alone in the street, between two sidewalks. When she looked at me, I could see that her eyes were moistening.
“I can talk to her about that,” she said. “She just . . . doesn’t remember what it’s like to have a teenager. I’m sure if we just talk all of this over . . .”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I know I can’t stay with you. I understand that.”
She sighed, and backtracked a couple of steps. She pulled her hat down tighter over her braid. “She’s your guardian,” she said. “She has great plans for you.”
She was sniffling now. That resolute quality I had heard in her voice in the last day was disappearing again.
“Does Jared know?” I asked.
She shook her head and paused a moment. “Just Meredith,” she said.
“Meredith knows?”
“She wanted to see the dome. She was curious. She waited in the car while I went in to meet with your . . . Nana. She wanted to see where you lived.”
“How long has she known?”
“We went yesterday after school.”
I thought about the poster. Her apology. Her smile. It was all pity. She knew I was being taken from her world. Sent back to my “eccentric” life on the town’s fringe. For now I couldn’t bring myself to think about everything I would be going back to. And everything I was going to miss. It was too overwhelming. Instead I had to buy some time, hold off the inevitable just a little longer.
“I’ll go back next week,” I said. “Give me the rest of this one.”
Janice breathed into her mittens to warm them.
“I’m not sure your grandmother is going to agree with that.”
“Please,” I said. “Give me time . . . to tell Jared. I can’t just leave him like this.”
I knew I was being manipulative now, but I couldn’t help it.
“I don’t want him to think I’m just walking out on him.”
She seemed to consider this deeply. I didn’t know if she was thinking about her husband, but the pained expression was back on her face. She breathed again into her mittens. They smoked with frozen air.
“Friday,” she said.
I watched her closely.
“Friday, I’ll take you back. That gives you two days to tell Jared. I’ll talk to him when you’re done. I’ll tell him there was nothing else we could do.”
“All right,” I said. “Friday.”
She came up to me then and gave me a hug. She hadn’t hugged me since I had moved in. Only those few times before, when she was trying to save my soul. I let myself be enveloped in her tan wool coat. It scratched against my cheek. It felt good. And I realized I couldn’t blame her for any of this. She had already done much more than I expected. She had a host of her own difficulties. This was my problem alone.
“She thinks you’re going to save the world,” said Janice.
“I know,” I said.
She let go, and the warmth of her coat left me.
“I wish someone had thought that about me,” she said.
We fell into stride and were silent the rest of the walk back. When I looked at Janice, I got a sad smile, so I stopped looking. I just concentrated on my feet, laying down one shoe after another. My orbit had opened and spanned the globe, or at least all of North Branch.