Forever Changes, page 6
Finally she went to bed. She tried not to think about anything, but it came back—that cold, hard fear in her stomach when she thought about being dead forever. She could joke about it most of the time, but when she really thought about doing it, it really terrified her. She couldn’t help thinking of being dead as just being all alone in the dark, and she wouldn’t even be able to look forward to having it stop, and she would just spend forever like that, feeling sad and alone and scared. She felt like crying, and she wondered if she should wake up Dad. But he wouldn’t have anything to tell her except whatever happens you won’t be sick, which was okay, except it was better to be sick and have your dad and your friends around than to be unsick and dead and alone always without ever ending.
She had to think about something else. She got up and popped the Forever Changes CD into her CD player. And for forty-two minutes, she felt better. She lay in the dark with the headphones on and the music playing, and she didn’t have to think about being Brianna. She wasn’t encased in a body that was lying on the bed; she was in the music. The CD ended, and, lying in the dark and the quiet, Brianna thought maybe being dead was like getting lost in music—maybe she’d just be lost in the music of the world, and she’d have no time to miss people or feel alone because she’d be part of everything. If you thought about it that way, it wasn’t so very scary. She knew the terror would be back, but it was gone for tonight. She turned off the light and worked on her vampire fantasy, and pretty soon she was asleep.
really beautiful and horribly ugly
Brianna woke up and immediately felt the terror rising up again, but with Dad’s weights clanking in the garage and the sky looking like it might contain sunlight sometime soon, she managed to focus on the day ahead and push her fear away.
When Dad was finished percussing, Brianna decided to tell him about that night. “So I’m sleeping at Melissa’s tonight, okay?”
“Where’s the party?”
“Dad, there’s no party.”
“Yes there is. Where is it?”
“It’s at Bryan McMahon’s house, okay?”
“Who’s driving?”
“We’re walking.”
Dad looked at her for a minute. “Really,” he said in this flat voice.
“I swear! Bryan lives like two blocks from Melissa’s house.”
“And you’ll remember all your meds?”
“Yes!”
“What about tomorrow morning? You gonna be home by 5:30 in the morning?”
“Dad, why did we even bother to train Melissa if you’re going to ask me that every single time I spend the night over there?”
Dad looked at her again. “I want a call if there’s any trouble or anybody needs a ride.”
Brianna rolled her eyes. “There’s not going to be any trouble, and we’re not even driving.”
“Okay. Just for God’s sake be careful.”
“Dad, I’m always careful.”
“And don’t sleep with anybody who doesn’t deserve you.”
“Aaagh! You don’t have to say that every time I go out!” Like anybody was even going to even notice her, much less want to sleep with her if she was standing next to Melissa and Stephanie anyway. They hadn’t invented beer goggles powerful enough to make that happen.
“I know, I know, I just–”
“I know, you got drunk and did something dumb and you’ve been stuck with me ever since.”
Dad’s face turned red. “You know what? I tell you this stuff because I love you and I care about you. It’s a really shitty thing to do to use that against me. Goodbye.”
Dad stormed out of the house, started up his bike, and left. Well, the hell with him. Wasn’t that why he was always telling her this stuff? “I got drunk and slept with somebody who didn’t deserve me and got stuck with this CF kid and if you do the same, I might get stuck raising a CF grandkid too, and I want to have a life when you finally croak.”
I mean, right? It was pretty hard to hear about how those actions could have unintended consequences when she was the unintended consequence.
Brianna arrived at school feeling a mixture of barely suppressed fear, annoyance with Dad, and dread of the awkward apology Mr. Thompson would offer if he saw her. She couldn’t wait to see Melissa and Stephanie, but she didn’t want to talk about anything.
Melissa and Stephanie had their own problems. Melissa had a quiz that day and was panicking. It took Brianna ten solid minutes before she was confident that Melissa understood the concepts enough to get through the quiz on her own.
As soon as Melissa’s pre-calc problems were squared away, it was back to Stephanie and how she and Kevin had a fight and then he went to the mall with some girl from Gloucester named Kandy. With a K. And she was actually asking whether she should dump him.
“Steph, that’s one strike and you’re out,” Melissa said.
“I know, but then he called me like an hour later and told me he was sorry and he loved me—he loves me! He never said that before! And he just sounded so cute, I mean he was really really sorry. And it’s not like I haven’t gotten mad at him and called somebody else.”
“Yeah, but …” was all that Brianna got out.
At that point, the bell rang, and Melissa and Brianna just looked at each other. “What are we going to do with her?” Brianna thought at Melissa, and Melissa’s look said exactly the same thing.
Adam had earbuds in his ears and yanked them out when he saw Brianna walk into homeroom. “Hey.”
“What’s up?”
“I am completely obsessed with Forever Changes. I have no idea what most of these songs are about, but … it’s just so cool.”
“Yeah. I like it too. Even if I can’t really understand it,” Brianna agreed.
“You know what I get from it? Well, I mean, I couldn’t really tell you what any single song is actually about, but I think the album is about how life is really beautiful and horribly ugly at the same time.”
Well, Brianna thought, that about sums it up. She was silent for a second as she let Adam’s words sink in. She’d been wondering what it was about the music that spoke to her, and that was it. It felt good to have somebody finally put into words what she’d been trying to figure out.
“Yeah. That’s exactly what it’s like,” she said.
“Well, let’s hope Mrs. Marrs buys it. I’m writing about it for English.”
Brianna smiled. Here was another difference between her and Adam. There was no way she would ever write about Love for English class, or even tell anybody else but Adam about the CD. It felt too private somehow. Or maybe, she thought, she just didn’t have the guts to admit in public that she liked something so weird. “You gonna like interview Eccles about it or something?” she aksed.
“Maybe after my paper is done. I think it’ll wreck my thesis if he tells me something about how they were all just stoned out of their minds and wrote words on pieces of paper and assembled them randomly or something.”
Brianna laughed. “So I got an interview at MIT on the same day as you,” she said.
“Cool! I’m glad … I mean, it’ll be good to know somebody there.”
In calc, Eccles was fine, totally his normal self. You’d never guess that he looked like he was going to croak on the beach the day before. He gave the homework, and while everybody was packing up, and he called out, “Ms. Pelletier! May I speak to you for a moment please?”
Brianna felt nervous, like maybe she’d screwed something up in her homework, or, worse yet, that Eccles was going to bring up what happened on the beach.
“Yes?” she said, standing at the desk, books in hand.
“Ms. Pelletier, I believe I owe you one of these,” Eccles said, reaching into his desk drawer and pulling out a Gatorade. Original flavor. Well, it was the thought that counted. “I do appreciate your kindness, and I would hate to see you wanting for a revivifying beverage.”
Brianna took the bottle. “Thanks,” she said. She turned to walk out of the classroom, but then, on her way out, she said, “Hey, Adam made me a copy of your CD—Forever Changes. It’s kind of cool.”
Eccles smiled. “Well, I certainly can’t take credit for any but the most miniscule contribution to that album. I was merely a foot soldier executing the orders of a general who was a brilliant, if troubled, artist. Still, I’m always happy when that particular underrated masterpiece finds a new audience.”
She didn’t know exactly what she wanted to get out of talking to Eccles about the album. Maybe she thought somebody who made music about the beauty and horror of life would understand her more than somebody who didn’t. Her curiosity about the album fought with her embarrassment about seeming like a dorky fan. Brianna turned to leave, but stopped at the door. “Uh, can I ask you something?”
“Of course, though if it concerns the lyrics of that album, I must warn you that the only times I’ve felt I fully understood it, my thinking was somewhat … occluded.”
“No, it’s not that, I just wondered. When you go to the beach to think about infinity, what do you think about?”
“Well, Ms. Pelletier, there are times when I watch the waves roll in, and I think about all the waves that have crashed on this beach for hundreds of thousands of years. I consider the waves that will continue to crash against this shore for years and years and years to come. Sometimes just having this visual aid helps me to get my brain to deal with the concept of infinity.”
“You mean like every wave is an integer or something?”
“Or something. Or perhaps every wave is a point between zero and one.”
Suddenly Brianna felt awkward and wanted to go to lunch. “Okay, well, thanks.”
She got about two steps, but Eccles kept talking like he hadn’t even heard her say anything.
“And sometimes I sit there late at night or early in the morning, and I think about the vastness of the ocean, of the sky, of the spaces between us and the nearest stars, about the incredible, unfathomable bigness of it all.”
Brianna could feel the terror curling around in her brain, and it never usually did that in the daytime. Why had she even brought this up? She really needed to get out of here, but Eccles wouldn’t stop talking.
“And yes, it strikes me that in comparison to all of the humans on earth, to all the stars, to all the atoms in the universe, I am infinitesimally small. If we were to assign a number to all the atoms on earth—let’s use the number one–my personal collection of atoms is so close to zero as to be nearly indistinguishable from zero. I mean, I am really not sure I’d want to divide by me.”
Brianna’s stomach was sour and panicky. Why wouldn’t he shut up?
“But here, Ms. Pelletier, is the thing. Without infitinesimals, the calculus as we know and love it simply doesn’t exist. It is these nearly-zero, sort-of-zero, sometimes-zero quantities that allow us to understand the world through mathematics. Something which seems to be nearly nothing turns out to be crucial to everything. So though I, or you for that matter, or any of us, may be, as a collection of atoms, nearly indistinguishable from zero, this does not necessarily mean we are insignificant. Indeed, it may be that, like the infinitesimals in our discipline here, we are actually crucially important.”
Brianna found herself cracking a smile. “I like that.”
“So do I, Ms. Pelletier. Enjoy your lunch.”
At lunch, Melissa and Stephanie were talking about something, but Brianna had a hard time paying attention. She kept thinking about being an important infinitesimal. It was a really good way to look at things, but the only problem was that she couldn’t just wait for somebody to plug her into an equation and try to divide by her. She’d have to figure out for herself what this particular infinitesimal was good for.
a high-percentile family
After school, Brianna dropped the Sunfire off at home and squeezed into the back seat of Melissa’s Echo.
When they got to the party, everybody was there. Even though Brianna felt a lot farther away from all these people than she had the last time she’d gone to a party, it was just nice to be in a house filled with people who were happy, to not have to do anything but just be there and be happy.
She stood with Melissa, and even the fact that guys were buzzing around Melissa like bees did to that honeysuckle bush near the beach in the summer didn’t bother Brianna. Since any of the guys with a brain, which was about half of them, knew that the best friend’s opinion could make or break the deal, they went out of their way to engage Brianna in the conversation. She actually got a kick out of watching guys try to pull off this elaborate social maneuver where they showed that they liked Brianna but preferred Melissa.
Before Brianna had even reached the bottom of her first and only foamy beer from the keg, Stephanie and Kevin started screaming at each other. He called her a stupid bitch and she ran off crying. Brianna locked eyes with Melissa, and they put down their drinks and went into rescue mode.
They grabbed Stephanie, who’d managed to get completely trashed in the time it had taken Brianna to drink what she estimated was seventy-eight percent of a beer in a twelve-ounce cup, or about 9.3 ounces of beer, except that the cup had had about an inch of foam in it, which threw her calculations completely out the window. Math was so much easier than the real world.
They pulled Stephanie out of the room while three or four guys, at least two of whom were Stephanie’s exes, started beating on Kevin, and three or four of Kevin’s friends started beating on them, and as they walked out the front door, they passed Bryan MacMahon on the cordless phone in his front yard calling the cops on his own party.
Stephanie had gone from blubbering to the occasional whimper, and then she started saying stuff like, “hope he gets his ass kicked.” Somebody had to be the bitch, but Brianna didn’t feel like she could do it, because she suddenly couldn’t stand the idea of Steph being mad at her. She tried shooting looks at Melissa to tell her to just forget it, tonight was too precious to waste on a fight that wouldn’t change Stephanie anyway. She thought maybe Melissa got her mental messages, but Melissa said, “Steph, aren’t you tired of this bullshit yet? ’Cause we are.”
Brianna didn’t even hear Stephanie’s response. Possibly thanks to the beer, or the fact taht something that seeemd fun had been interrupted by something violent and sad and gross, the fear had crept out of the back of Brianna’s brain and into the front again.
I’m leaving the party early, Brianna thought, and the fact that I’m gone won’t stop the party from going on. Mel, Steph, will you two still think about me when you and your husband are fat and you drive your four kids to soccer and gymnastics in a minivan? Will you ever even think about me being dead? Will you think every time you have a birthday, every time you’re with a new guy, every kid you have, will you think, here’s one more thing poor Bri never got to do? Will you? Or will you just get on with life and say, oh well, I’ll see her when I get there? But you’ll have other best friends by then. You’ll have moms from playgroup, you’ll have co-workers, and you’ll be so old, so much older than I ever get to be, and you’ll say I knew this girl once, and she died. Her picture’s in the yearbook in the attic. You guys are the best friends I’ll ever have in my whole life, you’ll never be less than that to me, and I’m on my way to being just somebody you used to know, that poor girl.
When Melissa said, “Right, Bri?”, Brianna told Stephanie: “Steph, I love you and you are better than this. And Melissa loves you and she knows you’re better than this too. It’s not that we’re tired of mopping you up because we have better things to do, it’s because we love you and we hate seeing you in a puddle.”
Stephanie whispered, “Thank you.” and they all hugged in the middle of the sidewalk, until some moron driving by leaned out the window and yelled, “Hot! Give her a kiss!”
Back at Melissa’s house, Brianna called Dad. “Dad, I need a ride,” she said, and hoped that she wasn’t making him climb off Cindy with this call. Who knew what he did when she was out?
“On my way. Where are you?” Dad asked. Brianna told him, and they hung up. She had to give it to Dad, he was totally serious about that call-for-a-ride, no-questions-asked business. Brianna guessed that only some tiny percentage of parents who said the same thing would actually give you a ride without asking any questions. Probably less than five percent. Which put Dad in the ninety-fifth percentile of parents. Which put him only a few percentiles down from where Brianna always scored on her math tests. We Pelletiers are a high percentile family, she thought. What are the odds, anyway, of hooking up with somebody at a party getting a kid with CF from ten minutes in someone’s room with the coats? Long, long odds. She wondered briefly whether they were better or worse than her odds of living to be thirty. Long, long odds.
Dad was covered in grease and dirt. He’d obviously been working on that custom bike, and not Cindy. He put a dirty hand on her shoulder as they were driving. It was his way of saying he was glad she called, and he loved her and all of that stuff, and Brianna suddenly felt about five years old. She started to cry.
“What’s the matter?” Dad said.
“I’m scared, Daddy,” Brianna said, and once she named it, it was just too much … “I don’t wanna die,” she cried, “I’m so scared, I’m so scared.”
Dad pulled the car over, and she looked over and saw that his eyes were all wet, too. “I know, sweetie. I’m so sorry,” he said, and he wrapped his arms around her as best he could.
They sat there for a while, with Brianna sobbing and Dad’s eyes leaking. Finally Dad said, “So, it’s only ten. You want some ice cream?”
“Definitely,” Brianna replied. Dad started up the car, and as they drove toward Hot Licks, which was open till midnight, they passed the houses by the beach. One had a light on on the screen porch, and Brianna thought she saw Eccles there, sitting in a rocking chair. Contemplating infinity, she wondered, or just contemplating why you’re all alone on Friday night?
