Chapter 9
I went to Mr. Barry’s funeral on Thursday afternoon, along with the rest of the school. Well, most of the school, anyway. They closed school so we could all go, but not everyone showed up. I’m not sure I blamed them. There were plenty of people who hadn’t known Mr. Barry from Adam, and even the ones of us who had were disappointed in the funeral. No one talked about him the way we remembered him, his quirks of precision, the way he would teach a class like it was storytime at the library. No one mentioned the huge number of books he had collected, or how that had contributed to his death, either.
I have to admit, it made me think that when I died, I hoped people remembered the real me better, even if it’s not all good.
There was a small reception afterward, at the funeral home. The casket had been closed, though no one explained why. I figured that the morticians hadn’t been able to change the expression of terror on his face, or maybe they just thought it was too depressing for high school students to see a dead teacher.
We had fruit punch in plastic cups and Chex Mix that one of the mothers had made and brought. To me, it tasted like brimstone. But then again, since I’d muttered the words of the demon summoning spell, almost everything did these days. I thought about it all the time, fought against the temptation even in my sleep, and imagined what my soul must look like—if there really was such a thing.
“Are you OK?” asked Georgia, afterward.
“I guess.”
“You don’t look so good.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“I meant—you look devastated.”
“Mr. Barry was a great teacher. I feel like people are talking about him in all the ordinary ways and they ought to be talking about him in extraordinary ways.”
“You really liked him, didn’t you?”
I nodded, catching my breath to avoid bursting into tears. I’d had enough of tears already this week.
“I already had a guy ask me out on a date. It was so incredibly annoying. At a funeral?”
“You turned him down?” I asked.
“Duh!” said Georgia. “I’m not that desperate.”
“We should go do something fun. Something just for us.” Something to remind us that we were still alive, and that life was good.
“How about going out for sushi?” asked Georgia.
Georgia loved all kinds of sushi. I’m a vegetables and cooked sushi only kind of girl. But between the two of us, we could put away a lot of sushi.
“You know why I like you?” asked Georgia, when we’d ordered a fifth round.
“Because I eat more than you do?”
“Yes! And also because you don’t tell me all the time that you’re on a diet and can’t have that or ask me if you look fat in something. You have a great body, don’t get me wrong. But you actually use it for stuff. You don’t just want it to look good. You want it to feel good.”
“Which reminds me, I have to go to the gym tomorrow morning, so we can’t stay up too late.” I hadn’t been to the gym at the school since last week, when all this began with Carter. I’d sort of blocked out going there. I had probably already lost some muscle mass.
“I should go with you,” said Georgia.
“Sure. I could show you how to do some machines,” I said. Georgia had never shown any interest in the gym before.
“I said I should go with you, but I won’t. Because I am not as tough as you are.”
“I’m not that tough,” I said. I was scared. That was the truth. And besides that, I wished I had some way to contact Rumpy. Where was the bat signal when you needed it?
“If you’re not tough, then I’m not a redhead,” said Georgia.
I laughed at that. She was a redhead all the way through, from her fair skin that burned even in the winter if she was out too long to her artwork, which she couldn’t bear to let anyone see. She wasn’t even in any art classes at school because she didn’t want to show anyone. If I was lucky, sometimes she would show me.
She had walls of drawings and paintings up in her room, and she was always ripping stuff up and throwing it away as not good enough. She was really good, but she had high standards. Like if she didn’t measure up to Rembrandt or DaVinci, it went into the garbage.
“I think I just need to sleep,” I said. So we went home.
I slept in short bursts that night, waking up every half hour in case I was mumbling the demon summoning spell. But it didn’t happen. Maybe I had forgotten it?
In the morning I woke up with my alarm and headed into the gym. It felt good to plan out what machines I was going to do that day. I always liked upper body and made sure I got in at least half of that, but I decided I was going to do a double session to make up for the last week. I’d be so sore tomorrow I wouldn’t be able to walk, but sometimes physical pain can keep you distracted from other kinds of pain.
I did the chest fly machine, at my maximum, times three sets of ten reps. Then biceps and triceps, then chin-ups and dips. I did some back rows and shoulder lifts. Then I finished up my upper body with pushups until my arms were trembling so badly I fell to the ground.
“Looking good,” said Will, one of the football captains. He came over and helped me stand up.
I think I dripped sweat on him, which would have made Georgia nervous, but Will and I were used to it. He flung sweat around himself plenty.
“Can you come spot me on a set?” he asked.
So I went over and made sure that he didn’t kill himself doing presses on the bench. He was absolutely ripped. He was also gay, which is a bit of a shame, I guess. He was an awesome football player, but he took me for granted even more than the other guys did. Not that I was looking for dates at the moment.
After that, it was on top abs and lower body work. I did squats and lunges, which didn’t hurt now, but were going to later. Then I did some calf raises.
“Hurts so good,” said Will, flipping his towel at me. There were a couple of other guys in the gym by then, watching me out of the corners of their eyes.
Don’t worry, I wanted to tell them. I’m not going to out press you. Not yet, anyway. Although if there had ever been a day when I wanted to push past my physical limits, today was that day.
I finished up with a killer set of reverse incline situps holding a 35 pound weight. I could hear myself grunting loudly at the end, each time I came up off the bench. It felt good to make the noise, to declare how I felt about the world. Noise is another sign of life. I was alive, and I was using my body to its limits.
Before I headed to the shower, I helped Will with another set. Then one of the younger guys came up to ask me rather shyly if I could give him some tips on getting killer abs.
“You a freshman?” I asked. He was shorter than me, and probably weighed under a hundred pounds.
He nodded. “I’m Jayden , by the way. I’ve seen you in here before, lots of times, but I don’t think we ever met.”
“Jayden ,” I said. I told him he had to do abs twice a week, and he had to really focus on the movement. Lots of people (especially girls) think that if you do a hundred crunches a day, you’ll get killer abs, but the truth is, you have to treat those muscles the same as any other. Really kill them, then let them recover. So heavy weights.
“What about the abs machines?” asked Jayden .
I waved a hand. “Worthless. At least, I think so. It’s better to engage all your core muscles in something like situps or pushups or even chin-ups than do that. That machine is like trying to use a pin when you need a hammer.”
He nodded at me and I could see he was impressed. Maybe if he wasn’t so young, I would have asked him out. Or if he hadn’t been so much in awe of me, he’d have tried it. But he was a baby, only fourteen, and that seemed as weird as anything happening between me and Rumpy.
“You keep coming and you’ll get stronger. Don’t give up,” I said to Jayden , on my way out.
“Nick used to say the same thing,” said Jayden .
“Nick?” I said, feeling like I ought to know the name.
“He used to come in here with me, too. He was a sophomore, and he wasn’t on any of the teams. He was quiet, but we came in after you had arrived. We used to watch you.”
“Nick—the one who is missing,” I said, finally understanding why the hairs on the back of my neck had risen. The one Mr. Barry had talked about.
“Yeah. No one knows where he went.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I wanted to offer him some hope, but I wasn’t sure I had any. If Nick had made a bargain with a demon, he wasn’t going to be found whole and brought home.
“Well, see you later,” said Jayden .
It was weird that this Nick kid had been at the gym so many times during the past year, but I had no recollection of seeing him. I should look him up in the yearbook, just so that I had his face in mine. But that wouldn’t help him any, and it would make me feel worse.
I showered as quickly as I could in the girl’s locker room. There were a few girls from the track team in there already, after having spent an extra morning doing laps. They looked strong, but also so thin that I wondered if I could pick them up and use them as weights. Or snap them in half. You have to really push your weight down to be a good runner, because the less weight you’re carrying around, the faster you go. Even if it’s muscle, you don’t want too much of it.
They didn’t talk to me, though, and I didn’t talk to them. They weren’t like the cheerleaders, but whenever I tried to make conversation, it never worked. Maybe the reason Georgia and I were friends were because we were both misfits. Being an artist around here wasn’t something anyone valued, and when Georgia was so likely to put her own work down, no one told her she was wrong.
I got dressed, noticing that the track girls went to dress in stalls, which I always thought was weird. It was the girls’ locker room so we didn’t have to do that, right? But I guess I’d been subjected to enough comments on my body to know what it was like to want to hide away. I just had the opposite reaction, and let people say what they wanted about me. It didn’t phase me. I just let it roll off my back and went on with my life. You can’t stop living because other people have nasty things to say.