Forever Changes, page 4
It took her another minute to stop coughing, and another couple to fight back the post-tussive emesis, which is what the doctors called it when she coughed so much she puked. She stood over the toilet for a minute, willing herself not to vomit. After getting it under control, she splashed some water on her face and went back to class.
Everybody was trying to solve a problem when she got back, so she took out her notebook and started working.
By the time class was almost over, when everybody was trying to pack up and get down to lunch, Adam did it again. His hand shot up, and Eccles kind of sighed and said, “Mr. Pennington?”
“Did you play guitar in a band called Love?”
“Mr. Pennington, in my youth I did a number of regrettable things, and so there are several years for which I have only the foggiest memories. I certainly remember something about playing guitar, but beyond that, it is all somewhat of a purple haze.” He gave this big grin, and then said, “Don’t forget your homework, which is on the board, and have a wonderful remainder of your day.”
Adam was right next to her as soon as she walked out of the classroom.
“It’s totally him! Did you hear that?”
“Yeah, but it sounded inconclusive to me.”
“I think he’s just messing with me. You’re not gonna forget being in a band like that.”
“No, I guess not.” Brianna conceded.
They walked in silence for a minute, and Adam, kind of randomb ly busted out with, “I’m going to MIT next month for an interview and an info session.”
“My Dad’s on my butt about going to one,” Brianna told him.
Silence erupted again, and she couldn’t stand it. “Is that where you want to go?”
“Absolutely,” Adam said, his face lighting up. “I really, like … well, no offense or anything, but I really hate Blackpool and Blackpool High, and I really want to go somewhere with a bad football team where nobody calls you a fag and punches you for being smart.”
Brianna looked at him and saw that he was blushing. He was keeping a straight face, but his voice had kind of cracked when he said that. “Oh.” She said. “Um, is that like a funny exaggeration?”
He looked at her like she was the stupidest person on earth. “No.” His smile came back, and he said, “Anyway, you should really go, even if it’s just to get your dad off your back. Here,” he said, digging a pen and a notebook out of his bag and scrawling a date and time on a piece of paper. “Here’s when I’m going. Myabe I’ll see you there.” They finally reached the ground floor, where Adam added, “Though I think I’d stand a better chance at MIT if we had a normal teacher who just told us how to solve stuff that’s on the AP and didn’t try to mess with our minds all the time. All that stuff about which infinity is bigger makes it harder.”
“I dunno,” Brianna said as they reached the cafeteria doors (“Take that, Zeno!” she thought.), “I actually kind of like that stuff. Well, there’s Steph and Mel.” Though they were math and alphabetical order buddies, Brianna and Adam inhabited very different places in the rigid social seating chart of the cafeteria.
“See you,” Adam said. “Tell me what you think of the CD,” he said, walking away.
“I will!” Brianna said. She watched as Pete, a football player Stephanie had hooked up with last year, bumped into Adam. She wondered if it was an accident.
As she sat down at the table, Melissa said, “Hey Bri, your boyfriend’s cute!” She and Stephanie laughed.
“You just never get tired of that joke, do you?” Brianna said as she sat down.
When she got up to throw her trash away, twelve minutes later, she saw Mr. Eccles, on cafeteria duty, standing next to the garbage cans. The can was nearly full, and Brianna stuffed her lunch bag gingerly into a spot where it looked like it might not topple the trash overflowing from the top.
“Ah,” Eccles said, “sometimes I like thinking of the stacking of trash in the can as a function with an as-yet-undiscovered limit. I believe, Ms. Pelletier, that your bag has brought us an infinitesimal distance from the limit of this particular function. When Mr. Teague there arrives with his mini Chips Ahoy wrapper, I think this particular function will become undefined.”
“I guess we’ll see,” Brianna said. She coughed, thankfully only once, and then walked away, turning back only as she heard the sound of garbage falling on the floor. Jim Teague was standing there looking stupid, and Eccles was grinning. “It’s all math!” he called out to her.
Brianna rolled her eyes, but, as she headed out of the cafeteria, she wondered if everything really was math, or if there were some things that couldn’t be plotted or predicted.
you set the scene
After dinner on Sunday, the “so” Brianna had been waiting for finally came. “So,” Dad said as he handed her a dish to dry. “Have you picked an MIT info session yet?”
Brianna sighed. “No.”
Dad washed a pot in silence for a minute. “You told me you would.”
“I know, I know.”
“I need to be able to believe what you tell me, honey,” Dad said, still looking only at the pot he was washing. Ugh. She hated that he was playing it this way. Instead of giving her all kinds of reasons why she should go that she could argue with, he was just pulling the “I need to be able to trust you, that’s the kind of relationship we have,” which was his strongest card. She was always amazed at how Stephanie and Melissa pretended to be somebody for their parents that they really weren’t, and as much as he got on her nerves, she was glad she never had to do that with Dad.
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll do it this week. I promise.”
“Really?”
“Yes, okay! I promised. I don’t break my promises.”
“I know you don’t,” Dad said. “It’s something I admire about you.”
“Jeez, Dad, I said I would call, you don’t have to keep laying it on so thick.”
Dad stopped washing and looked at her. “I’m not blowing smoke up … I’m being straight with you, Bri. I want you to do something with your incredible brain, so you don’t end up working at Bargain Zone, and I do admire you.”
Brianna was about to respond, but Dad jumped in, “not because of the CF, but because of the kind of person you are.”
Brianna felt really uncomfortable. “Thanks,” she said quietly, and stowed away everything she wanted to say about how even spending the time filling out applications to go to a college she’d never live to get a degree from was pointless. And how she had to stop preparing for things because there wasn’t going to be a future to prepare for. It was actually a relief not to say any of that stuff, because as she turned it over in her mind, it felt scary.
Later, Dad was in the garage tinkering with his bike, and Brianna sat alone at the kitchen table with her homework spread out in front of her. It had been light out when she sat down, so the only light on in the house now was the one lonely light that hung over the table. She’d already done all the homework she didn’t mind doing, and she’d talked to Stephanie once, and Melissa twice, though one of those calls was her talking Melissa through an easy pre-calc problem, so that really didn’t count. She reached into her bag for her history book (“The Slab of Tedium” Melissa called it), and her hand found the CD Adam had given her.
She took it out of the case. “Love: Forever Changes” was scrawled on it. She put it into her CD player and slipped the earbuds into her ear. Even if it sucked, it would give her something to think about besides the incredibly boring history chapter she had to read.
The music was weird—it wasn’t at all like anything she could place. She guessed it was rock, because there were guitars, but there were a lot of trumpets and violins too. The guy sang in this kind of fruity voice, and the lyrics reminded Brianna of “step into the freezer with uncle Ebenezer” or whatever the crap was that the stoner kids always played at their parties, but then weird lines about people dying and blood coming out of the bathtub and people with snot caked on their clothes kept jumping out at her.
As she was finishing the questions on the chapter, she heard this:
For the time that I’ve been given’s such a little while
And the things that I must do consist of more than style
There are places that I’m going
This is the only thing that I am sure of
And that’s all that lives is gonna die
And there’ll always be some people here to wonder why
And for every happy hello there will be goodbye.
The song went on and on. When it ended, Brianna hit the back button and listened to it again, pausing and backing it up as she came to the part about how short your time is.
This, she thought, is exactly why I don’t want to apply to college. She had never been able to put it into words, but she felt something she realized was relief. Here was somebody singing—okay, in a weird song that she could never play for Stephanie or Melissa—something she’d been feeling but had been unable to put into words. She couldn’t apply to college. There just wasn’t enough time.
And on her third listen to the song (“You Set the Scene”, Adam’s chicken scratch on the jewel case insert told her), what struck her was the part about how there would be people left to wonder why, and she had this image of Dad standing over her grave and crying. Just for a minute, she thought that would be the absolute worst part about dying. First Mom broke his heart, and soon Brianna was going to break it again. As much as she hated being a burden to him, hated the sacrifices he made for her, she felt even worse about the idea of making him sad forever.
The CD ended, and Brianna sat there in the silence under the lonely light and cried.
i was thinking about you
Before she left the house on Monday, Brianna wrote a note that said “Call MIT” and taped it where she’d be sure to see it, on a bottle of Gatorade in the back of the fridge.
At school, she plopped down at a table and turned on her CD player. She’d woken up thinking about this weird music, and it was satisfying to hear it again—like eating a fluffernutter after Mr. Eccles got her thinking about fluffernutters.
She was only two minutes into the first song—“Alone Again Or” (Or What? Brianna wondered, but the song, which didn’t even have the word “or” in it, gave no clues) when she saw Todd step into the caf. He obviously saw here, but he pretended he didn’t. He performed an elaborate head-slapping show like he’d forgotten something, and walked out again.
She sighed as the guy on the CD said he’d be alone again tonight. Well, that was certainly it for Todd. It wasn’t like he’d been some great love or anything; they had been friends, and they’d helped each other out. She made sure Todd didn’t fail Algebra 2 for a second time; he made sure that she didn’t die a virgin. Brianna had given Todd strategies to get through math at a ‘C’ level, but she couldn’t really make him get it on a deep level, and she certainly couldn’t create in his brain even the palest shadow of her appreciation for the beauty of math. And Todd, for his part, hadn’t been able to make Brianna understand what the big deal about sex was.
Still, she was able to check something off her “Things to do Before I Die” checklist because of him, and they had been friends, or at least friendly enough that he wouldn’t pull cheesy moves like pretending he didn’t see her. Well, if that’s how he was, she was better off without him, which was what Dad was always telling her anyway. Still, she felt like she knew what would happen next: he’d continue to pretend she didn’t exist, then he’d be at his locker with some sophomore girl with big boobs who looked twenty, ostentatiously kissing her all the time and pretending that he’d never been with the senior girl who looked twelve.
She scrawled, “Don’t you dare come to my funeral, loser” on a piece of paper. She wondered if she should fold it up and put flower doodles on the outside and slip it into his locker like she had a couple of times when they’d arranged tutoring sessions.
She laughed to herself at the thought, but it started her coughing. Fortunately, it didn’t last long, and she was able to pull what she hoped was a very discreet tissue-to-mouth-phlegm-spit maneuver. She didn’t like the coughing, but she was used to it, and everybody understood. The spitting, though, never stopped being gross and embarrassing, but once she had seen what that stuff looked like on a tissue, there was no way she was going to swallow it.
She smiled to herself remembering Melissa’s reply when she’d told her that. The CD played on, and Brianna found herself hoping that Melissa and Stephanie would be late. She wanted a few more minutes with this weird music that her weird math teacher had made.
The music got her thinking about Molly, and then she did something really stupid. She reached into one of the many zipper pockets on her backpack and took out the envelope she had carried there for the last five months but hadn’t looked at since last April. Just seeing Molly’s handwriting on the outside of the envelope felt like an electric shock, and Brianna knew she might start bawling. Put it away, she told herself, look at it later.
But her hands kept going, opening the envelope and seeing Molly’s note. Way too short. Way way too short. Why didn’t you write more, Molly? Why didn’t you tell me something useful about how to do this?
Hey Girl! Looks like I’m on the home stretch here. I hope you’ll read this poem at my funeral. I like it a lot. I love you and I’m sorry I have to go.
Love,
Molly
Thirty-six words. Just over 1.7 words for every year Molly had lived. And then a photocopy of a poem by Robert Frost called “Good-By and Keep Cold” that Brianna had read a hundred times, that she read again now, that she couldn’t really make sense of, except, “I have to be gone for a season or so.” Now her tears were really about to come flooding out, but a tap on her shoulder snapped her back into the cafeteria.
She hastily stuffed the envelope back into her backpack and looked at the tapper. Adam, smiling this big smile. She was relieved that somebody had pulled her out of Molly’s funeral, but she was annoyed that it wasn’t Stephanie or Melissa. Right time, wrong person.
“Did you get a chance to listen to the CD?” Adam asked.
“Yeah,” Brianna said. “You know what? I really like it! I mean, it’s kind of freaky. I don’t know. I like the way it’s kind of pretty and psycho at the same time.”
Adam got this goofy, enthusiastic look on his face. “I’m totally there. I listened to it once and thought it was the weirdest piece of crap ever, but then I couldn’t do anything else until I listened to it again. I listened to it probably five times last night.”
So it wasn’t just her. That was a relief.
“I downloaded a bunch more songs from other albums if you’d like them,” Adam said.
“Sure!” Brianna replied. Adam reached into his bag and pulled out a CD. Adam had printed the cover of some old Love album and put it in the jewel case; it was printed so small that Brianna couldn’t make out much except that one of the guys was wearing flood pants and ankle boots. Which one was Eccles, thirty-five years and fifty pounds ago?
“I was really into the lyrics, so I downloaded all of them and printed them in the booklet,” Adam said.
“Cool!” Brianna said with unfeigned enthusiasm. As she took the CD, she saw Katie and Keianna, two of her “friends” watching her with Adam the geek and whispering and giggling. They went over and sat down with Chris and Jim, two more people Brianna would have once called friends, and she felt all four of them looking at her.
Brianna took the CD and put it in her bag and thought this semi-dorky guy had done more for her in the last two days than most of the people she’d once considered friends ever had.
“Thanks a lot, Adam,” she said.
“Okay, well, I better go,” Adam said, looking over her shoulder. “Bye!” he called as he practically ran away.
Stephanie arrived about one second later.
“Hey, Bri, how’s your hot friend?” Stephanie said, grinning.
“Shut up. He’s good.”
“I saw his body language. I don’t know, Bri, I think he likes you.”
“He does not. We’re math buddies, and he made me a CD and—”
“He made you a CD? And he doesn’t like you? Yeah, okay.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Making somebody a CD is a way of saying, ‘I was thinking about you when I was home. Alone. In my bedroom. With a box of tissues and—’”
“Okay, okay, you’re disgusting. Are you just trying to make me lose my appetite so you can have more chocolate munchkins? Cause it’s not gonna work.”
Stephanie started talking about how Kevin was starting to act weird, and Brianna knew this meant there was breakup drama on the way.
to ponder the infinite
When Mr. Thompson, the college counselor, finally ended Thursday afternoon’s senior class assembly at the final bell of the day, Brianna bolted out of the auditorium. She could hear Stephanie calling “Bri!” behind her, but she had to get out of there. She jumped into the Sunfire and put-putted up the street, swinging the car around the corner without hitting the brake. That felt a little better, but still not good. She could go home, but today was Dad’s day off, and she really didn’t want to talk to anybody right then.
Her phone started playing those familiar notes in her purse—probably Stephanie or Melissa. It was definitely somebody who was planning to go to college, and probably somebody who wanted her math skills to help them out. She let the call go to voicemail.
Brianna drove until she reached the beach. The snack shack was shut for the winter even though it was still September, but Mario’s House of Clams was open. She grabbed a 24-ounce ice blue Gatorade and her enzyme pills out of her bag and went in and got some fries. She poured a bunch of salt on them and walked over to the beach. She wondered idly what the volume of this weird French fry container was. It was a rectangular solid, but it sloped up from the bottom like a cone. So neither formula would really fit. One more thing in life that seemed simple but was actually really complex.
