Wonders of the Invisible World (9 page)

But instead I said, “Sounds fun,” and asked, “What do you have in the lineup?”

“I'm thinking we should go for a classic first,” he said, raising his eyebrows a few times with real excitement that I was good with his change of plans. “Maybe a slasher. Then we can move on to something current, possibly a supernatural thriller. Those were always your favorites. Or we could watch something so bad it's funny.”

“When we were kids,” I said, “we didn't watch scary movies and laugh.”

I said this with confidence. This much I could remember.

“Christ, no,” said Jarrod. “Back then I
believed
in the boogeyman. And you seeing all kinds of spooky shit sure as hell didn't help convince me otherwise.”

I looked down at the orange shag carpeting. It was the same carpet I remembered from when we were kids, and it was probably the same carpet that had been in that trailer before Jarrod's parents had lived there. Looking at it made me feel a little better, because it was something I hadn't forgotten, a touchstone, something that had leaped the chasm between my past and present, making everything feel continuous inside me, at least for one brief moment.

Also, it was easier to look at that carpet and refuse to think about what Jarrod had said about me seeing spooky shit back then.

“Hey,” he said, his voice softer now. “I'm sorry, Aidan. I didn't mean to bring that up again.”

I looked up, sucking in one cheek a little, and said, “It's okay. I'd rather you talk about it than pretend it was never real.”

“Thanks,” he said, like I'd done him a favor. He stood in the doorway between the living room and kitchen, his arms braced on the frame above his head. “I'm glad to hear you say that. I hate having to be fake around people. I'm glad I don't have to be fake around you.”

He turned to go into the kitchen and left me standing there wondering why he would ever have to be fake with anyone. A guy like Jarrod is usually the sort lifted up on everyone else's shoulders because he can throw a baseball past batters and leave a bit of smoke coming out of the catcher's mitt afterward. At least he didn't see things other people couldn't. At least the thing that made him different was a good thing.

A minute later, he returned with a couple of beers. “Want one?” he said, holding out a sweat-beaded bottle.

I thought about my mom and her prediction that drugs and alcohol would appear at Jarrod's party. A little anti-drinking commercial played in my mind for a second, and my mom was an actor in it, wagging her finger at me. Why did she always have to be right?

I shrugged it off a second later, though.
It's just one beer,
I told myself. And
it's just the two of us, anyway.
And that piece of logic nullified the accuracy of my mom's prediction just enough for me to not care.

I took the cold bottle out of Jarrod's hand then, and twisted the top off like a trouper.

By ten, we'd made our way through two old slasher flicks—
Nightmare on Elm Street
and
Friday the 13th
—and we were just getting to the end of a third movie—
Paranormal Activity
—which had been made like a documentary about a demon-possessed woman whose boyfriend won't stop filming her.

“What an idiot,” Jarrod said, shaking his head as the movie ended.

“She kept telling him to stop filming her,” I said. “No means no, dude. You get what you deserve.”

Jarrod chuckled and took a swig from his bottle. We were on our fifth beers, and I was feeling fuzzy around the edges. A different fuzzy than how I usually felt. This felt like I was somehow lighter, like some kind of pressure had been relieved. This felt like the opposite of those times when a migraine would come for me.

When Jarrod finished his beer a second later, he stood and went to the kitchen to retrieve the last two, then came back with the top already taken off mine. “I don't think you should drive home tonight,” he said as he stretched to pass me the bottle. “I couldn't live with myself if you got into an accident after drinking over here.”

“I guess I could stay here,” I said. “I'd just have to call my parents and tell them.”

“Sure,” Jarrod said. “Just don't sound drunk when you talk to your mom or she'll be over here in a hurry to get you.”

“It sounds like you've had practice at doing this,” I said, laughing.

Jarrod laughed too. “Okay, okay,” he said. “You've got me. But learn from my mistakes, grasshopper. Practice makes perfect.”

So I practiced talking out loud for a while, just to make sure I wasn't slurring my words, which I didn't do at all. Which surprised me. I'd always expected that the first time I drank anything alcoholic, I wouldn't be able to stand, let alone talk coherently. The beer, though, hadn't hit me hard. Probably because it was the cheapest stuff Jarrod could find in the coolers of the shadiest little convenience store in the next town over.

After all that practice at talking sober to fool my mother, though, it turned out to be my dad who answered the phone when I eventually called. He said staying over at Jarrod's was fine, but he expected me home early enough to help him with chores the next morning. I said, “Sure thing. Will do. Thanks, Dad.” And when I clicked my phone off a second later, Jarrod slowly raised his fists into the air, shaking them victoriously, like we'd just won a championship ball game.

“Come on,” he said, and got up to lead me back to his room.

While the carpet in the trailer was something I remembered from hanging out there as a kid, Jarrod's room seemed different. It was the size of a matchbox, made even smaller by his bed, which was this huge sleigh-shaped thing that barely fit. It took up most of the space, leaving only a person-sized path to walk around its edges. In my memory, the room had been way bigger. Maybe, though, I only remembered it like that because I'd been a lot smaller.

“You can have the bed,” Jarrod said, nodding toward it. “I'll sleep on the floor.”

I looked at that narrow strip of free space around the edge of the bed and said, “No way. That won't be comfortable at all.”

“I've slept in worse places,” Jarrod said, shrugging. I wondered what he meant, but didn't ask.

“I can sleep out on the couch,” I offered instead, turning back to the living room. “I don't mind. Really.”

“No,” he said. “My mom will come through there when she gets home from work, and if she smells beer on you she'll go crazy. I already put the other evidence in the trash can out back. I don't usually have anything around to set her off, but I figure what she doesn't know can't hurt her.”

“It's your call,” I said. “But it's also your bed. Why don't I take the floor instead?”

Jarrod opened his mouth, but for a moment he just stood there, saying nothing, as if he'd lost all of his words. A strange look passed over his face. Then quickly he sat down on the edge of the bed, put his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, and he started to mutter, saying how stupid he was, how he wished he wasn't so goddamned stupid.

“What's the matter?” I asked. But he just kept shaking his head and mumbling about how he was a complete idiot. When that was all I could get out of him, I sat down beside him and put my arm around his shoulders, trying to comfort him. He flinched when I touched him, though, as if I'd tried to stick a knife into him, so I let my arm drop again. “Hey,” I said, “what's wrong? Did you drink too much? Are you sick?”

“You should probably go,” he said, not looking up from the floor to face me. His voice had fallen to almost a whisper. “I'm sorry I had you over like this.”

“I had a good time,” I said, still not comprehending. “It's been fun. I don't understand. Did I do something wrong?”

He looked up from the gloomy position he'd taken, and I could see that he was thinking about something. Behind those dark eyes, some unwanted thought kept floating by, like a fish behind glass, wanting to get out, to be free of his skull. “You don't remember a lot of things, I know,” Jarrod finally said, his voice shaking a little. “But I was wondering, do you remember this?”

He took my hand from my lap then, and held it in his. At first I thought that he was going to share a memory with me, the way he had at the park, that he was
reaching across
again. But when no memory came, and his thumb continued to softly caress my knuckles, I looked up and saw him waiting for my reaction. “We used to hold hands like this,” he said, “when we were kids. Even when we were almost thirteen. I know it must sound strange. So many other things that used to be normal, you can't remember. But do you remember this?”

I shook my head, slowly, but he didn't take his hand away. I didn't take mine away either, even though I wasn't sure what I was even thinking, if I was thinking anything at all. Holding his hand did somehow feel normal. But I wasn't completely receiving his message.

“Is it there now?” he asked.

“Is what there now?”

“That wall you told me about. The wall that springs up inside you sometimes.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head, even though I was starting to get nervous enough to almost wish that I had the wall there right now.

“I'm trying to tell you something, Aidan,” said Jarrod, his voice growing smaller as he tried to admit something big.

Sometimes I wish I could go back to that moment and wake up right then, to understand everything again, so I could do the right thing, so I could say the right thing to Jarrod. But at the time, my head was still broken.

After it became clear that I wasn't able to say what he hoped for, that I still didn't know my lines, Jarrod took his hand away from mine. “I didn't come back to Temperance because I missed it,” he said, his voice now flat as an iron. “I came back after my dad caught me with a guy and kicked me out.”

“I thought you left because of your dad's girlfriend,” I said, and Jarrod looked over to roll his eyes at the enormity of my stupidity.

“Jesus, Aidan,” he said. “I made that shit up. His girlfriend has her own apartment.” He stood then, and went over to lean against the doorframe with his back to me. “I was embarrassed by the truth, okay? When I came back here and saw that something was wrong with you, that you couldn't remember some things, I was afraid you wouldn't remember us. Like that. Like the way we were with each other. And clearly you don't.”

He sighed, frustrated that I couldn't fill in the rest of what he was trying to say. “Just go,” he said eventually. “I'm sorry I had you over like this. I was being selfish. I was hoping if we spent time together like we used to, alone, you'd remember how you felt. Which was pretty dumb of me, obviously. We were just stupid kids back then, anyway, weren't we?”

“Well—” I said, but Jarrod lifted a hand.

“Please don't,” he said, still looking down the hall instead of facing me, as if one glance from me might set him on fire. “I'm embarrassed enough. Just go, Aidan. Just go home, will you?”

I didn't want to leave with things so unsettled, but with him not willing to talk any longer, I did what he asked and stood, brushing against him in the narrow doorway as I pushed past. For a moment, a flicker of energy leaped between us, like it had when he'd reached across to me at the fountain in the park, and I stopped there, waiting for him to change his mind. When he didn't say anything, I shook my head, angry, and fled.

After firing up the Blue Bomb and backing down the drive onto Cordial Run, I felt more sober than I'd been before drinking the six-pack. I stuck to the back roads anyway, drove slowly with the window down so that the cold October wind blew against my face as the red and yellow leaves of autumn appeared in the wash of my headlights.

I didn't know how to think about what had happened, about what he'd said and about that weird flash of heat and energy that had sparked between us. I was too surprised. By his confession, by the way I hadn't pulled away from him, even as I started to understand. I'd just sat there and watched him caress my hand like it belonged to him. And then, to top it all off, I'd said nothing after he told me a truth that obviously hurt him to talk about.