Lucius

I have to admit: standing here and watching Jessup kiss Aurora, and being powerless to do anything to stop it, ranks right up there with some of the worst things that have happened to me.

But I also have to admit, they look like they belong together: two beautiful people kissing.

And one last thing I have to admit: I’ve been keeping a close eye on Jessup these past several days, and what I’ve seen has made me wonder if I could be wrong about him. He’s taking his acting very seriously and I’ve noticed he’s very attentive to Aurora, doing his best to make sure she’s shown off to best advantage in the scenes that they share together, that she’s comfortable. It’s almost as though he’s a character from a fairy tale, Prince Charming, the guy who’s always willing to just look like a neutered Ken doll so that the Barbie beside him can shine that much more brightly. And Aurora mostly looks happy when she’s onstage with him, making me wonder if maybe it might not be bad for her to wind up with someone like him. After all, like her, he’s got everything.

Jessup has even been nice to me lately, at least whenever Aurora’s around. Every day now, he invites me to eat lunch with them. But every day I decline. I’ve gotten used to eating by myself.

But even though I’m starting to think Jessup might not be half bad, even though I’m starting to think that maybe he and Aurora belong together, seeing them kiss onstage is just too much to bear.

So I busy myself with working on my bible for the play, with making sure all the props get returned to their appropriate places as rehearsal ends.

The only problem is, I’m so busy keeping myself busy, I miss my bus.

What am I going to do now? I wonder, as I race after the bus, miss it as it pulls out of the parking lot. Who would have ever thought I’d wish to be on a bus?

“What’s wrong, Lucius?” a sweet voice behind me asks.

I turn to see Aurora standing there. Beside her is her father, the librarian, Mr. Belle. Every time I see him, I always like Mr. Belle. It’s not as though we have these great conversations—we don’t—it’s more that, unlike all the other teachers and administrators in this school, he always looks at me like I could be just any normal kid and not maybe a disaster waiting to happen. You’ve gotta love a guy who sees the good in all people, even if you never see that yourself.

“That was my bus.” I can’t prevent a groan, almost a whine, from entering my voice. “I’m supposed to take the late bus home from rehearsal,” I say, “and that was the last bus. My parents are going to kill me if I’m not home on time.”

“No worries,” Mr. Belle says easily. “We’ll be happy to give you a lift. Why, with all the stops the bus has to make, we’ll probably even get you home early.”

“Thanks,” I say, climbing into the back of their Volvo. I’m uncomfortable having people do stuff for me out of pity, but I see no way around it: my parents weren’t crazy about my working on the play in the first place, and I’m worried that if I’m late, even once, they’ll change their minds.

I have so little life outside my home, even in my home, I have so little that’s mine, it would be death to have that little taken away.

As we drive, I talk only when I need to tell Mr. Belle what streets to turn at; apparently, he knows this town as poorly as I do. So, since I’m not talking, I sit back and listen to the pleasant sound of Mr. Belle and Aurora’s chatter swirling around me. Mr. Belle asks Aurora how the play is going and she explains in detail, filling him in that I’m the stage manager. Their voices are so happy, the questions they ask each other so innocent—as though neither is suspecting the other of harboring anything dark. It’s so different from the way my own family sounds, I could almost resent it. And yet, I don’t. I’m just glad for Aurora, that she has this happy world. She deserves it.

“So, how about it, Lucius?” Mr. Belle’s words break through my thoughts.

“Excuse me, sir?” I say.

“Daddy just asked you if you’d like to have dinner with us tonight,” Aurora says.

“But we’re almost at my house,” I say, feeling an unreasonable panic begin to well up inside. Funny how you can hate a place and yet have an unreasonable need for it. I wonder if this is what convicts feel like, hating prison and yet somehow acting in ways that land them back there again and again.

“But you can still call your parents and ask them, can’t you?” Mr. Belle counters amiably. Really, was there ever such an amiable man as Mr. Belle?

In a way, his amiability right now is downright annoying. Still, there’s no need to let him suspect this, certainly no need to let him think my life is anything other than normal, so I attempt to paint my parents as strict as opposed to pathologically worried about what I might do if left on my own for too long.

“I’m not sure my parents would like that, sir,” I say. “They’re pretty strict about me staying in on, um, school nights.” That’s good, I think: a parent/librarian should appreciate other parents being serious about their dedication to their children’s studies as opposed to this lax attitude you see everywhere these days. There’s no need, I think, to tell Mr. Belle that except for school activities and the occasional trip to the library, I’m really not allowed out of the house on my own.

Mr. Belle’s eyes meet mine in the rearview mirror. I can tell he knows there’s something not quite right here, but it’s impossible to read what he’s thinking.

I make sure to keep my own expression vacantly innocent as I hold his penetrating gaze. Are my eyes open wide enough? Yes, I think they must be, because my eyeballs are starting to hurt from all the air hitting against them.

“Fine,” he finally says. “Then I’ll ask your parents for you. Now, then, how do we get the rest of the way to your house?”

Oh, great. This should really be good.

When we pull in to the driveway, Mr. Belle tells Aurora and me to stay in the car. It’s late afternoon now, almost early evening, but the day has been warm so the car windows are all half open, hence all the air on my overexposed eyeballs. The half-open windows mean that Aurora and I can hear the sound of Mr. Belle’s soles clacking along the pavement, hear the sound of him knocking at the door.

We hear when my mother answers, “Yes?” as she opens the door.

We hear Mr. Belle’s voice, sounding as though if he had a hat on his head he would raise it in polite greeting now, say, “I’m Robert Belle, Mrs. Wolfe. I’m the librarian at your son’s school.”

We hear as my mother, a mixture of horror and worry in her voice, groans, “Oh, no. What has Lucius done now?”

The shocked tone of Mr. Belle’s voice when he responds makes me immediately aware that in his world—in Aurora’s world—parents don’t automatically assume the worst of their children.

“Oh, no!” Mr. Belle says. “It’s nothing like that! It’s just that your son is stage managing the play my daughter is in, I offered to give him a lift home”—I notice, gratefully, that Mr. Belle artfully avoids telling my mom I missed the bus, as though he knows instinctively this will make her hostile to his request—“and when we were almost here, it occurred to me how pleasant it would be to have him join us for dinner this evening.”

Again, I am sure that if Mr. Belle were wearing a hat, he would politely doff it at my mom now.

I am positive that I have never in my life seen my mom simper before, and yet, as I cautiously peek out the window, I note that she is practically doing so now.

“Well, if you really want him, Mr. Belle . . .” Is my mother blushing?

“Oh, we do, Mrs. Wolfe, we really do,” he reassures her.

“I guess that’ll be okay, then,” she says. Then she sterns up, as though she’s just reminded herself that she’s supposed to be a parent and not a pushover; a parent of a boy like me, no less. “But don’t keep him out too late,” she warns.

“I wouldn’t dream of it, Mrs. Wolfe,” he says with one last invisible hat doff.

A minute later, I raise my hook to wave goodbye to my mom as we drive away in the car.

I can’t believe it. For the first time in forever, I’m going to eat dinner with someone other than my family.

I hope I don’t spill things all over myself.

The house Aurora and her father live in is so different from my own house, I immediately feel as though I’m stepping into another world.

It’s tough to put my finger—if I still had one—on what exactly it is, but there’s just a generous warmth that permeates everything here. Even though my family’s lived in the new house for a few months, it’s still as though we just moved in yesterday, as though we might be moving out again at any moment. But here, well, it feels as though the people residing under this roof actually live here. Even the smallest items have a wanted and loved look about them, not at all like the things people buy just to have something serviceable.

“Can I get you something to drink while I get supper ready?” Mr. Belle offers. “Lemonade? Soda?”

“Water will be fine, thank you,” I say, not sure what to do with my hooks, I’m feeling so awkward—when I try to cross them casually across my chest as I’ve seen other guys do, my hooks protrude alarmingly—so I just put my arms crossed at the wrist behind my back. “I’m not much of one for soda.”

“You’re my new hero,” Mr. Belle says. “I’ll buy you a car if you can convert my daughter to your way of thinking.”

“Dad!” When Aurora says it, she turns it into two syllables, accompanying the word with such a dramatic eye roll, if we were in the auditorium at school ticket holders in the back row could still see it. But I can tell she’s not really bothered. She doesn’t mind her dad’s teasing.

“Can I help with anything?” I offer as Mr. Belle removes items from the fridge: chicken breasts, the fixings for a salad, corn on the cob.

“Nope,” Mr. Belle says. “I’ve got it all under control.”

I thank the gods he doesn’t ask me to shuck the corn for him. Who knows what sort of mess I’d make out of that simple chore.

As I’m breathing my sigh of relief, Mr. Belle reaches into a cabinet down next to the sink and pulls out a frilly-edged apron that he proceeds to put on over his shirt and tie. I’m not accustomed to laughing at other people, but it does look funny. I make eye contact with Aurora and ask a question with my raised eyebrows, but she just shrugs, rolls her eyes again.

“Where’s Mrs. Belle?” I think to ask. I’m a guest in someone else’s home, I remind myself, for the first time in a very long time. I should do my best to be a good guest, to show interest in their lives. Isn’t that what a normal person would do? “Does she work late usually?”

Mr. Belle’s back is to me as he answers. He’s chopping a tomato and he doesn’t stop. “Mrs. Belle is no more, I’m afraid.”

It takes me a while to process this, and then . . .

Ouch. I’ve really put my foot in it this time, I think, based on the sudden ramrod look of Mr. Belle’s back. I figure he must be divorced, and recently so.

“My mother’s dead,” Aurora adds. “She died a few months ago.”

More processing.

The enormity of what they’ve just shared with me—I feel as though I’ve just taken a punch to the gut. And for the first time, maybe ever, I realize that there are worse things than losing your hands.

“I’m sorry,” I say lamely. “I wouldn’t have said anything. I didn’t know.”

“It’s okay, son,” Mr. Belle says, his back still to me as he goes to work on a head of lettuce; it’s funny, I don’t think my own father has ever called me “son,” and yet this man does it so easily the very first time I am in his house.

I recognize the green stuff in his hands as romaine lettuce and I think, inanely, how all my mom ever buys is iceberg.

“There’s no reason you should have,” Mr. Belle goes on. “After all, it’s not like people go through their lives with signs on their foreheads saying ‘This is the awful thing that happened to me this year.’”

Actually, it’s funny he should say that, since my hooks are my own constant testament to “This is the awful thing that happened to me last year.”

“I really am sorry,” I say to Aurora. Sorry—I know it’s inadequate to what they’ve been through, but it’s all that I’ve got.

“It’s okay, Lucius,” Aurora says.

Since there’s no way to make this moment better, and no way I can take back the last pain-filled moment or the last period of however long these two have been hurting, I simply say, “If you show me where you keep the plates and things, I can set the table for you.”

And I do, taking great care not to drop anything or make a disturbing sound.

After dinner, a surprisingly jovial meal given what has gone before, Mr. Belle says he has some work to do in his office.

“Why don’t you and Aurora take dessert out on the patio?” he offers. “I promise I’ll still get you home at a reasonable hour like I told your mother I would.”

So we take our plates with slices of lemon meringue pie out onto the patio.

The evening is starting to get cool out here, the glow of the early moon making the light from the colored lanterns behind us unnecessary. As I fork up some of the unnaturally yellow filling and lightly toasted meringue of the pie, careful as I was all during supper not to make a visible slob of myself, I think how at my house we never sit outside in the evening, or any time really. We are always inside, inside, hiding away from the world.

“What happened to your mom?” I ask into the silence.

It is a somewhat rude question, I realize as soon as I ask it. And yet now that I have been informed of Mrs. Belle’s death, it somehow feels as though I would be even ruder not to ask it, as though I was willfully ignoring the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room.

“She got sick,” Aurora says, an obvious sadness tingeing her tone as she answers straightforwardly. “She got sick with cancer several years ago. Then she got sicker and sicker. And then she died.”

It is a story without details. And yet, I wonder, what details does it need? It is all there, in the four short sentences she has spoken: an impossible sorrow, a world of pain.

I lay down my fork, carefully place my plate on the little redwood table that attaches the two chairs we are sitting in. I think how Mr. Belle and Aurora probably sit out here often in the evenings. As we move further into fall and then winter, they will probably stop.

I wipe my mouth with the napkin, fold it, and place it across the top of the empty plate.

“I’m sorry,” I say again.

“I know,” she says. Then:

“What happened to your hands?” she asks softly, at last unable to ignore the other eight-hundred-pound gorilla.

Really, between the two of us, we are practically a zoo out here.

No one has ever asked me this question before, unless you count Nick Greek, and for some reason I don’t count him right now. I suppose I always knew this day would come, but I also always assumed I would simply answer “None of your business.” And yet now that the moment is here, and I see the sincere concern in Aurora’s eyes, I can’t help but tell her the story.

I study the trees, punctuating what I assume must be the far edge of their property. In a knothole in one of the trees, a squirrel is busy with some kind of squirrel-type industry. I study the trees a moment longer, and then I start to speak.

“I stole some chemicals from the science lab at my old school,” I say, not meeting her eyes, still looking at the tree line. But out of the corner of my eye I see that she’s not looking at me either. She too is staring straight ahead. I have an impulse, an almost hysterical impulse to laugh that right now it is like we are two people sharing the same bad roller-coaster ride at a beat-up old amusement park. I control the impulse.

“What kind of chemicals?” she asks.

“Sodium, magnesium—the authorities said afterward they found traces of eight others.” Now that I’ve started, I’m ready to tell it all, and I do so, not waiting for her to prompt me along with any more questions.

“The school claimed afterward that they had no idea how I’d stolen them. They claimed they took every precaution to keep them safe. But, apparently”—I allow myself a wry grin—“they didn’t really take every precaution. It was a day when we didn’t have any school, but it wasn’t a regular vacation. You know? It was like one of those crazy days we get off every now and then: Teacher Redevelopment Day or something like that. I had the chemicals down in the basement of our old house—I had my own little lab set up down there, on the other side of the room from our old pool table—and I was trying to . . . make something. But, I don’t know, something didn’t go the way it was supposed to, and there was this explosion.” I take a breath, release it. “It was an accident. My dad was at work and I thought my mom and little sister were out shopping. But it turns out, as I discovered after I regained consciousness, they weren’t. They were in a room at the other side of the house and, thank God, neither of them was hurt.”

“But you were,” she puts in softly.

“I was,” I answer steadily, not feeling sorry for myself at all. “I blew off my hands. My chest and stomach? You do not want to see that.” I think how at that first gym class Jessup called me Frankenstein, and for some reason I almost smile in the half-dark. “I don’t know why my face wasn’t damaged beyond repair. I guess the universe decided to spare me just one piece of luck that day—well, three, including my mom and sister being okay. But I was in critical condition for a long time, spent a month in an oxygen tent. And our old house? The assessment put the damages at being almost what my parents had spent on the house ten years earlier. I used to wonder, after I got out of the oxygen tent: How is it possible for damages to almost equal worth?” I shake my head. “I don’t think my parents have ever forgiven me, my sister neither.”

The recitation of my tale is far longer than what she said about the loss of her mother, and yet Aurora’s reaction is an exact replica of mine, perhaps because some stories don’t allow for a lengthy response.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“I know,” I say, well versed in my lines and content to speak them.

I do note that she doesn’t ask me the one thing I think nearly every other person would ask me right now: Just what exactly was I trying to . . . make with those ten chemicals?—and I am grateful for this. Somehow, I sense that it is not a lack of curiosity or imagination; it is respect. And again I am grateful.

One thing she can’t possibly know: I’ve left one crucial fact out of the telling.

“So,” Aurora asks, shifting gears completely, just as I did earlier in their kitchen after Aurora told me her mother had died, “are you going to Jessup’s party a week from Friday?”

“I haven’t heard anything about any party,” I say, which is a lie. All week long, it’s been impossible to avoid hearing Jessup invite kids all around me.

Aurora’s pretty brow furrows in puzzlement. “That’s funny,” she says. “It’s supposed to be for the entire cast and crew. Jessup said so.”

I shrug, pretend I don’t care. “I must not be invited,” I say.

“But that’s impossible,” she says. “It’s supposed to be for everyone involved with the play.” She laughs, a wind-chime sound, as she adds, “Well, except for Mrs. Peepers.” Then quick, before I realize what she’s doing, she reaches out a hand and places it on my arm, not the plastic of my lower arm—no, not that—on my upper arm, where there is real skin beneath my shirt.

I feel as though my whole body could explode at her touch. Nobody ever touches me if it can be avoided. And, for the most part, I have been content to keep the world at this distance; at arm’s length, if you will. But not now. This is the first time that anyone outside of my family has touched me in a very long time, and my entire body feels it, enjoys it, fears it.

“Please come, Lucius,” she says, as if it really does matter to her: whether I’m at Jessup’s party or not.

I look at her: that dark-angel hair, those serene-ocean eyes. She is, I think, the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. And yet somehow, that doesn’t matter in the slightest. She could lose that physical beauty tomorrow and she would still be Aurora. Everything is who she is, what she is.

“Please,” she says again. “You deserve to have some fun. We both do.”

Gently, so as not to scare her, I extract my arm from her touch. I can’t bear to be touched by her any more because despite her intensity, I know she cannot possibly like me in that way, as people say.

Still, how can I say no to her?