Lucius

Two weeks have passed and, so far, I have survived.

I spend my Saturday morning doing laundry. This is something I do whenever I have free time now. My mom, seeing how frequently I make trips to the basement laundry room, has offered to do this for me. I think she worries that I’m turning into an obsessive-compulsive, or that maybe I’m down here trying to transform the washing machine into a bomb. But I don’t let her do my laundry. I say she has enough of her own work to do. My obsessions are my own. I want my stiff jeans to fade, get softer. I may not care, generally speaking, what others think, but my stiff jeans make me feel like a dork. Vanity, thy name is sometimes Lucius.

I’m transferring the wash into the dryer when I hear Misty’s tread on the stairs. Even though she makes every effort to be a bratty sister and daughter—I sometimes think it’s a role she’s learned from watching too much TV—her footsteps are cheerily distinctive, containing a bounce that is nothing like my parents’ tired footsteps. I glance up to see her slouching in the doorway of the laundry room. She looks bored or something.

“What’s going on?” I say.

“Wanna shoot pool?” she offers, not really answering my question.

“Sure, just let me finish this,” I say. I finish loading the dryer, hookload by hookload, use my hook to set the dial at seventy minutes, use my hook to depress the button.

I go through the door of the laundry room, then pass through my dad’s home office at the base of the stairs—thankfully, he’s not there—and into the rec room, where Misty is waiting for me, balls racked, cue stick already chalked.

I was a much better pool player than Misty before the accident and, having put much effort into recovering my game, I am once again.

I sometimes think that whoever invented hooks for hands, that person must have been someone who loved pool. How else could he have designed a device that performs so perfectly at the game?

“Do you want to break, or shall I?” I ask, taking a twenty-one-ounce stick out of the wall rack and chalking it until the tip is coated in that perfect sky blue, blowing the excess dust off the tip. It sparkles briefly in my field of vision, hanging in the air before drifting down to the brick red linoleum floor.

“Me,” Misty says, bending over to line up the cue ball in her favorite spot: just an inch in from the right bank, so far forward that it’s flirting with a violation of being over the break line.

I’ve tried to tell her before that this is an insane position to break from, that you can’t get enough power from it, that it’s too easy to scratch the shot, but she never listens. Misty can be stubborn that way.

I know what she’s thinking when she breaks, know why she opted to break herself rather than letting me take it: she knows that this way at least she has a chance to sink a few shots before I take over the game. She knows I’ve become such a bionic pool player that if I break, there’s a fair chance I’ll run the whole table.

Who wants to lose without ever even being in the game?

Misty does pretty well. She doesn’t scratch on the break, managing to sink two balls: a solid and a stripe. It’s her choice, and she goes for solids, training her stick on the maroon seven. She sinks it no problem, but then she blows an easy tap shot on the blue two, groaning as she cedes the table to me.

I study the remaining twelve balls, plotting how I can sink all six of the striped balls left plus the eight.

People think to be a good pool player all you need do is put a ball in the pocket, like hitting a ball over the fence in baseball or a tiny ball into a tiny cup in golf. But there’s so much more to it than that. In order to be really good, you need to be able to see the shot after the shot you’re taking right now; to be great, you have to see how to strategize in order to clean the whole table. Pool is a game of concentration and angles, yes, but it’s also a game of looking to the leave: If I do this, where does it leave me? If I take this shot, what angle do I need to come at it from not only to make my shot but also to set myself up for where I want to be for my next shot? Oh, and by the way, if I sink all my balls, what’s the point of my accomplishment if I manage to stitch myself on the eight?

To avoid that last problem, I’ve lately taken to working the games I shoot backwards in my brain, meaning I think first about how I want to come at the eight in the end, before working backwards in my mind, step by step through each ball and angle it’s going to take me to get there until I arrive at the first ball that needs to be conquered.

But I don’t do any of that higher-level playing right now as I face off against Misty. I sense there’s something she wants to discuss with me but that she won’t get the chance if I run the table on her. So I go for the long orange thirteen striper—picking a table-length shot, so she won’t get suspicious—but instead of sinking it smoothly and with authority like I can, I tap it just enough off center to cause it to bounce off the pointed corner of the bank.

“Darn,” I say, shaking my head as though amazed at my own ineptitude. If I still had fingers, I would snap them here to emphasize my dismay at my own lack of finesse. As it is, I have to settle for shuffling my feet and staring at my cue as though it’s somehow offended me.

“I chalked this thing, didn’t I?” I say.

Misty rolls her eyes at me. “Of course you did. Aren’t you the one who’s always telling me ‘chalk is cheap’ and that I have to remember to chalk my own cue between each shot?”

“That does sound like me,” I say, and for once, even though it’s so rare for me, I can’t help but grin.

Misty studies the table, doesn’t grin back.

“So, how’s the new school working out for you?” I ask Misty as she takes her turn. I figure, she’s a kid, she’s always been a far more social kid than I am, so what else could be on her mind?

“There’s this boy in my class,” she says, “Bobby Parker.”

“There’s always a Bobby Parker,” I say.

She looks at me, puzzled by my wit.

I sigh. “What did this particular Bobby Parker do?” I ask.

“He somehow learned about you,” she says. “He told me he thinks you’re crazy.”

“And what did you say in response?” I ask, sure of the answer. Surely she will have agreed with this Bobby Parker: Misty’s brother is a nutcase, a whackaloon. Good citizens would be well advised to hide all the women and chickens.

“I told him if he didn’t shut up about it,” she says, “I’d sic you on him and then he’d see how crazy you really were.” She looks at me like she’s worried I’ll yell at her. “Was that okay?”

I try not to let the huge smile I’m feeling on the inside show on my face. “I’m not sure that threatening your fellow classmates with me visiting upon them grievous bodily harm is the best way to convince them that I’m not the craziest person in town,” I say sternly. But then I just can’t help it: the smile breaks across my face. “But yes,” I add, “what you told Bobby Parker was perfectly all right. Just don’t make a habit of it.”

She heaves a sigh of relief, and I think how I can’t believe this: my little sister has stood up for me.

“It must be hard on you,” I say, sobering, “having everyone in school think your brother is crazy, maybe even acting as though you must be just like him. I’m sorry.”

She shrugs. “It’s not really that bad.” Then she laughs. “I mean, at least they’re not all Bobby Parkers.”

We share a chuckle moment now that she has at last grasped my earlier joke.

“Really, aside from Bobby Parker,” she says, “I’ve made a ton of friends.” Now it’s her turn to sober. “Anyway,” she says, “it must be even harder on you.”

“Not really.” I shrug, not wanting her pity. “So tell me about this ton of friends.” Ton of friends—it’s a foreign country to me.

I listen as Misty excitedly tells me about girls with names like Kiki, Tiki, and Biki.

“Biki?” I say. “Did someone actually name their kid Biki? What is wrong with some of these parents?”

I mock that which I don’t understand while wondering at the world Misty and Aurora live in, an astonishing world in which a person can make a ton of new friends instantly without even appearing to try, an unimaginable world in which a person actually expects to make a ton of friends and can even do so by following that insane advice to “Just be yourself.”

“How about you?” she asks. I can tell right away that she knows exactly where my mockery comes from, see the pity in her eyes. “Have you made any friends in your new school?” She poses the question cautiously, as though she expects the answer to be obviously negative.

“One,” I say. “Maybe.”

Misty raises her eyebrows at me, a look of shock and an invitation to tell her more.

I think of Aurora. I think about the evidence I see before my very eyes every day in the cafeteria: Celia liking Jessup, Jessup liking Aurora, Aurora liking . . . who? I think how, even though I was a jerk to her that first time she tried to talk to me in the cafeteria, and even though I’m still often a jerk to her, it hasn’t stopped her from saying hey to me every time she sees me in the halls—who knew that having someone else simply say hey to a person could feel like such a big deal, could become the high point of a person’s every day? My being a jerk hasn’t stopped her from smiling at me each time she says hey, sometimes even going further to ask how I’m doing whenever we’re in the same place for more than a second. She is the only person in the school, including teachers, who is constantly nice to me.

I am not used to other people being kind.

And, since I am still frequently a jerk to her, responding to her overtures with terse one-word answers, I wonder why she bothers. And yet I can’t help the way I act around her. I was terse with her that first day in the cafeteria because I didn’t want her pitying me, because I had no idea how to handle someone being nice to me for a change—it had been so long—and now I don’t know how to stop. I’m like a prickly pear, and yet Aurora can’t seem to stop herself either, can’t seem to stop being nice to me.

“Maybe,” I say again to Misty. “Maybe.”

I see another look of pity cross her face. In Misty’s social world, where more is always by definition better, it must seem pathetic: the idea of a person having only one “maybe” friend.

We finish out the game.

I let her win.

And afterward, for good measure, I let her beat me again.