The Art of Adapting Page 6

  “I heard you,” Lana said, hands on her hips. Her hips were bigger. Not much, but enough that her jeans had little horizontal wrinkles running between her hips. The jeans were straining to contain her. Her hands were holding her tight now, too. Even tighter than the jeans. Little wrinkles formed in the backs of Lana’s hands as she gripped her wider hips. The gripping meant stress, strain, unhappiness, this much Matt knew. He could feel Lana’s unhappiness seeping into his body, settling into his sternum, expanding within his chest. It made it hard to breathe.

  “And now you’re mad?” he asked. “You’re mad at me about wanting a different fork?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not mad.” She rubbed her forehead. Massaged the pressure points just above her eyebrows. Matt wondered if acupuncture would help her. He wouldn’t do it, let someone put needles in his body, needles that might have anyone’s germs on them, but Lana was a schoolteacher and was around germs all day long, so she probably wouldn’t mind.

  “You could get acupuncture,” he said, pointing toward his forehead, and suddenly Lana was laughing.

  “I’m not upset because you like a certain fork, okay? I want you to feel comfortable here. It’s just . . . everything piling on all at once. Sometimes it’s too much for me. I don’t have all of the solutions that everyone expects me to have.”

  “Solutions? I think you mean money.” Matt finished arranging his food and watched Lana’s earrings sway as she spoke.

  “True. Teenagers have expensive tastes and hobbies and sports and I don’t have the means right now. Maybe after I get a better job.”

  “You have a job. You said you like your job.”

  “I love my job. But it doesn’t pay enough.”

  Matt eyed the corn. It was definitely cold now. He touched it with his fingertip. It was cold and not buttered. He pulled out his wallet and looked inside. There were several bills, various denominations. He removed them all and held them out.

  “Here. And can I have warm corn? With butter?”

  “Matt, I’m not taking all of your money, and yes, you can have warm corn with butter.”

  She leaned over for the corn, her jeans pulling even tighter, and Matt set the money on the tray.

  “I don’t really need that money. My friend Bill pays me to do programming for him. He just sends me money every week. I don’t even mind the work. It’s fun for me. I do it at night when I can’t sleep and it helps my mind calm down. And the money keeps coming, but I don’t really need it for anything. Maybe you can use some of this money for acupuncture.” Matt pointed to his forehead, but he didn’t mean for him, so then he pointed to Lana’s forehead. “And to get more jeans. You’ve gained weight and those are too small for you now.”

  Lana looked up, hands back on her hips, wrinkles back in her hands. Matt tugged at one of the belt loops of his jeans, which were nice and worn from many washes, and showed her how they should fit.

  “I wear Levi’s. They fit perfectly.”

  “Yes, they do,” Lana said, leaving with both the corn and the money.

  Matt sat on his bed, watching the back side of his closed door, waiting for her to return. He needed something on the door. A poster or calendar or something to look at while he waited. He rearranged the meatloaf plate, carrot bowl, and blue milk cup, but it didn’t feel right. He needed the small salad plate with the corn before any of it would work.

  The noise from the kitchen grew louder, then there were footsteps, too many of them and too loud, getting louder. He covered his ears again just as his door opened and Abby and Byron, very excited now, proper use of the word, jumped up and down in his doorway yelling something he couldn’t understand with his hands over his ears. Wouldn’t even have understood without his hands over his ears, he was pretty sure.

  They were wild and hopping, like rabid kangaroos. Only not Australian kangaroos, since there was no rabies in Australia. Kangaroos were marsupials. Opossums were also marsupials, and opossums were rabies-resistant. So perhaps kangaroos were rabies-resistant as well, even the ones not in Australia. Matt eyed his computer. If the kids weren’t jumping up and down in front of it he’d go look that up right now. Could kangaroos get rabies? It seemed very important to know.

  Then Lana came back with the corn, and he could see it steaming, a pat of butter precariously balanced on it and ready to slip off. She shushed the kids and Matt risked removing his hands to accept the corn.

  “What they mean is thank you,” she said, barely above a whisper.

  “Thank you!” the kids both whispered, so loudly that it was like the rasp of a rake against concrete. They held up the money, his money, and smiled at him, as if waiting for something else.

  “The corn is better now,” he said. The kids looked at each other, smiled in their magnet-pulling-together way, and left laughing.

  “You’re a good uncle,” Lana said softly, “and a good and generous brother. But lay off my weight.” She shut the door and Matt leaned over the corn, inhaled the steamy aroma. It was perfect. It made up for the meatloaf.

  He finished his dinner and looked up the rabies statistics while he waited for his ice cream. Lana was good about always remembering the ice cream. He loved ice cream, but he never got it at Spike’s, because their freezer was broken, and Spike didn’t want a repairman to come inside to fix it. Spike never wanted anyone inside their apartment.

  Matt pulled out his Google map of directions to Spike’s apartment. It said it would take him three hours and forty-five minutes to walk the 11.3 miles. That seemed like an awfully long time. Matt didn’t know if he was a fast walker or a slow one. He only ever thought about walking to Spike’s in the middle of the night when he couldn’t sleep. He knew he wasn’t supposed to take sleeping pills anymore, but he missed them. The ice cream was better at Lana’s, but the sleeping was better at Spike’s.

  The doctor had Matt on Wellbutrin now, which was supposed to keep him calmer, and he supposed it did. His impulse control was better. He didn’t act out anymore; when he got upset he was able to keep it inside until it went away. The Wellbutrin was like a warm fog weighing down on him that kept him from going to that place that he couldn’t come back from. He hadn’t kicked or thrown anything in a while, and he could see how it wouldn’t help the situation to punish inanimate objects. The drug was supposed to help him censor his spoken thoughts better, too. He still said things that he didn’t know would upset people, like telling Lana she had gained weight. It couldn’t have been a surprise to her. She had to know she was fatter. People got upset when you told them the truth. That’s what Matt had learned. The Wellbutrin helped him not tell the truths in his head quite so often.

  The job he’d had before programming for Bill had been programming for Annette. She was a nice lady, but she didn’t like how Matt wouldn’t look her in the eye or answer her right away. She got in his face and spoke too loud and it was hard to get away from her sometimes. But Matt liked the work. And he was good at it. The best coder on the team. And Annette knew it, too. So she put up with the no eye contact and nonresponses. Until she had a baby and brought it in to show it off, and Matt was amazed at how much it looked like the pig-baby in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It looked exactly like it. So he told her so. And then he got fired. Because his boss had an ugly baby. The Wellbutrin might’ve helped back then. Maybe he would have thought about the pig-baby but wouldn’t have said it aloud.

  Lana came in with Matt’s ice cream and picked up his dinner tray.

  “Kangaroos?” she asked, and he jumped. “Sorry,” she said. She was always doing that to him. She would say a word to him and it’d startle him out of his thoughts. She pointed to his computer screen, to the rabies information before him.

  “Some marsupials are rabies-resistant,” Matt said.

  “Oh, great,” she said.

  “It is,” he said. “It takes many tests to diagnose a human with rabies. Saliva, spinal fluid, hair follicles. Not easy to diagnose before symptoms. You need to be sure, bec
ause rabies is a fatal disease.”

  “Is it fatal?” she asked. “I thought there was treatment. Those stomach shots.”

  “Treatment only works before there are symptoms. Once you have symptoms, have rabies yourself, it’s fatal. Rabies is four thousand years old. Raccoons, skunks, and foxes are the most common rabid animals in the U.S. But mostly bats give it to humans here. Except in Hawaii. No rabid bats there. I don’t know why. Also fish, reptiles, and birds. No rabies for them. And not in Australia. No rabies there, just lyssavirus. So no rabid kangaroos. I’m not sure about all marsupials, but opossums are rabies-resistant. Maybe because of their lower body temperatures. Not immune, but resistant. Rare, for an opossum to have rabies.”

  “Even our opossums?”

  “Even ours,” he said. He started to eat his ice cream and kept reading. When he looked up, Lana was still there. He didn’t know how much time had passed.

  “I didn’t mean to upset you by saying that you’re fatter,” he told her. “You’re eating more because you’re unhappy. Mom ate a lot more when she was sad, too. Do you remember, after Stephen died? She ate all the time. But she didn’t want to get fat, so she threw up after she ate. It’s not healthy, eating all the time. But throwing up is also bad for you.” He pointed to his teeth, which he carefully cleaned twice every day, and which could be stained, or worse, by stomach acid. “You aren’t throwing up, so you’re getting fatter, but it’s better for your teeth, not throwing up.”

  “I didn’t know you knew about Mom,” Lana said.

  “I notice everything,” Matt said. “Well, most things. I notice things that people don’t think they show me. And I write it all down.” He gestured toward his notebooks. “I like to have data.” He thought about showing her a notebook, but then she might touch it, and he didn’t like people to touch his things any more than he liked people to touch him. “Once you’re happy again you won’t eat so much and your jeans will fit again.”

  Lana laughed and shook her head. “You’re like my living, breathing conscience, Matt,” she said. “With you around I don’t even need my conscience.”

  Matt took another bite of ice cream and shook his head. “Oh, no. Without a conscience people would do terrible things.”

  She handed him his melatonin and he swallowed it with the last of his milk. Maybe it would help him sleep for a few hours. He’d just given all of his money to Lana, so he couldn’t very well go to Spike’s tonight. Spike wouldn’t give him pills if he couldn’t pay for them. That much he knew.

  “Is Nick Parker going to teach me to hit a baseball?” he asked.

  “Do you want him to?”

  “No. I don’t think I care about that anymore.” Matt was almost done with the ice cream. It had just the right amount of chocolate sauce left, now melting into a swirling pool of chocolate-streaked creamy vanilla soup. “Maybe he could teach me to shoot a gun, though.”

  Lana shook her head. She started to say something, then stopped herself. Then she said, “The noise alone would probably do you in.” Matt nodded. He had to agree with that. She was probably right.

  “Okay, then. Maybe the baseball after all,” he said.

  “I’ll let him know,” she said. And she smiled as she held out her hand for his ice-cream bowl. The worried, eating Lana disappeared for a moment, and a happier one appeared instead. Matt liked that one better.

  7

  * * *

  Abby

  It just wasn’t fair. Abby knew life wasn’t supposed to be fair, as her father liked to remind her, but this was beyond unfair. She watched Caitlin, slut-in-training and terrible defensive midfielder, fawn all over Gabe. He laughed and leaned toward Caitlin, his face inches from the cleavage barely contained by her V-neck soccer jersey. Abby wore a tank top under her jersey, because if she leaned forward you could see straight down her shirt, and see that she had nothing in there. Plus, sweating in the polyester gave her heat rash, which looked like a minefield of mini-zits. Abby was playing pretty well, despite being low on energy from skipping lunch, and she silently praised herself for this, because nobody else was going to. Coach Zimmerman hardly ever noticed Abby. He even marked her absent a couple of times when she was standing right in front of him.

  Abby turned away, unable to watch them anymore, and caught Emily’s eye. Em gave her a sympathetic half frown, half shrug, which was nice, but didn’t help. Emily had one of those annoyingly perfect bodies: tall and skinny with noticeable breasts, and every boy in school had noticed. If Em wasn’t so shy, Abby was sure she’d be dating one guy after another. Or any guy at all, which would still be more than Abby.

  Abby ran into position for the next drill and waited with the rest of the team for Caitlin to finish her hair-flipping and bending-over display for Gabe.

  “Caitlin!” Coach Zimmerman shouted, followed by three short whistle bursts. “If I have to call you back into position one more time, you’re running five laps!”

  Abby and Em smiled at each other. Caitlin giggled one last time and sauntered into position. Caitlin never ran anywhere unless she absolutely had to, claiming her large breasts hurt when she did. All the more reason to avoid running laps, right? Apparently not. Abby was pretty sure Caitlin liked any chance to reference her own boobs. Even getting in trouble so she could use them to try to get out of her punishment. Coach Zimmerman turned beet-red whenever Caitlin pointed at her chest and said she couldn’t do laps because the bouncing made her breasts ache. But then he’d recover.

  “Change sports, or run. Your choice.” He said it to her about three times per practice, but still nothing changed.

  Caitlin was trouble, anyone could see. And she could hold Gabe’s attention like no one else.

  After practice, drenched in sweat and splattered in mud, her ponytail failing as wisps of hair swirled out from her head like Medusa’s snakes, that’s when Gabe decided to finally notice Abby. She was pulling her water bottle out of her bag when he came over to fetch his blue hooded sweatshirt lying on the ground next to her. If she’d known it was his, she’d have sneaked a sniff of it before he came for it.

  “Hey,” he said, giving her a quick little head jerk as he pulled the sweatshirt on.

  “Hey,” Abby said back. She was already light-headed from the workout, and Gabe’s attention kick-started her heart. She had a floaty feeling as he stood in front of her, like it was a dream. She saw a few colored spots dance on the periphery of her vision. She guzzled water so she wouldn’t have to say more. She was less likely to embarrass herself if she stayed quiet.

  “You look good out there,” Gabe said. “You’re getting faster. Those longer legs of yours, I guess.”

  Abby stopped drinking. He’d noticed her legs? They turned to jelly and she wished she had a place to sit down.

  “You ever think about track?” he asked. He cocked his head to the side, looking at her from a near-profile. From this angle she could see every one of his long, thick eyelashes, the gentle slope of his perfectly balanced nose, the fullness of his lower lip.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. My brother runs track.”

  He turned, looked right at her. He had a thin cluster of freckles on each cheek. “Byron, right? He’s good. You could be better.”

  Her stomach did a little flip. She smiled at the ground. His eyes were so deep dark green, it hurt to look directly into them. “Why?”

  “Why do I think you’d be better? You’re more focused. More disciplined.”

  She nodded. “Definitely. Byron’s a lazy slob.”

  “He’s pretty quick for a lazy slob.” Gabe laughed and pushed up the sleeves of his sweatshirt. His forearms were tan and toned, decorated by a thin dusting of blond hair. “How’d you do on the chem midterm?”

  Abby drank more water and shrugged. She couldn’t tell him she’d tanked the midterm. She was one of only two freshmen in the class. Her and Nori, who was a certifiable genius. They’d both earned top honors in their math class in middle school, so they’d been placed in AP
chem as freshmen, which was a big deal. It’d been a proud moment at home when they got the news. Lana had made red velvet cupcakes and everything. And now Abby was floundering, even though she knew she could handle the work. She couldn’t very well tell Gabe that it was his fault.

  “Not as good as I hoped,” she admitted. The chem teacher, Mr. Franks, wanted to meet with her. Maybe he wanted to kick her out of class, have her wait until her junior year like everyone else. She’d never gotten a C before in her life. What did they do to you when you got a C?

  “Seriously?” Gabe looked surprised. “I was sure you’d ace it.”

  She shook her head. She didn’t have Caitlin’s body, or Nori’s brains, but she knew how to get a little sympathy. “My parents just split up, and it’s hard to study when I keep getting shipped back and forth between them. I think that’s the problem.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know. Sorry.” Gabe reached out and touched her shoulder with his long, lean fingers. It was the closest she’d ever been to him. A faint earthy whiff of lavender came with him, lingered after he withdrew his hand. She inhaled and held it, afraid to let it go.

  Caitlin came up behind Gabe, neither sweaty nor dirty, makeup reapplied, fluffing her wavy bleach-blond hair.

  “I’m fine,” Abby said. “Forget I brought it up.” The last thing she wanted was Caitlin overhearing them talking about her broken home.

  “You know, me, too,” Gabe said, pointing at his muscled chest. “My parents. Two years ago. It gets better.”

  She smiled, bravely looking right into his eyes as she did so, for just a moment, before she had to look down at her muddy cleats so that she could breathe again. He was kind and beautiful, smart and athletic. Could there be a more perfect guy?

  “Gabe?” Caitlin called. She sounded testy, like they had plans and he was late. Caitlin waited about ten feet back, her hands on her curvy hips. She was the kind of girl who made guys come to her.

  Gabe looked over his shoulder at Caitlin. She waved him over, three quick flicks of her hot-pink-painted nails. He turned back to Abby. Was it wishful thinking, or did he look just the littlest bit annoyed at the interruption?