Renee is asleep. I don’t think she likes me as much as she used to. Maybe it’s not a good idea to spend several hours convincing someone you just met that you’re the biggest jerk on the planet, huh? I’ve only talked about Gus with her too. Haven’t really brought up you or Jerri or Andrew. I did tell her my life is an ongoing horror movie. She rolled her eyes, shook her head, said I didn’t know crap about anything, and then she sort of passed out.
Now we’re in Georgia.
Maybe I’ll buy Renee something at the next stop. A candy bar? She’s a vegetarian. Some broccoli? She seems pretty sad.
You know what I don’t like? Being punched.
Back in the bad old days of Felton yore, I was shoved and elbowed and knocked on the ground at recess—and kicked in the gut while lying on the ground. Good times. I used to be angrier about it. Now I’m a different person (except when Gus punched me). Maybe I should do something for kids who get punched a lot. Like what? Buy them candy bars? Broccoli?
Here’s weird: while that crap was all happening back in those bad old days, when the guidance counselor asked if I got picked on, I’d tell him no. “Not me! I’m grrreat!” I wasn’t great. I was very, very mad. And also terrified, but not of other kids, exactly. Scared of not being able to do anything (like ask for help) about the crap without just catching more hell, maybe. Could a guidance counselor stop kids from hating me?
No. I don’t know.
No.
Scared that there was no control, no stop button. I had no control over anything at all.
Do I have control now, or did I just get lucky? Clearly me turning into an athlete like my dad has nothing to do with control. I have athlete genes, that’s all. Nobody caused it. I didn’t try to become an athlete.
Now my oldest friend punches me?
Upside-down world. I got lucky for a while, but I’m still cursed. I still don’t have any control. Shouldn’t I be terrified?
I’m not. I’m riding a bus in the middle of the night in Georgia next to a girl named Renee. She’s a good person. I can tell. I’m not afraid.
After Gus punched me, I asked to drive, because I wanted to be in control, I guess (so I could drive us off a cliff if he hit me again? I don’t know), and then we drove in silence. He didn’t say he wanted to go home. He didn’t apologize. The side of my damn nut throbbed and the edge of my eye was kind of blurry because my face was swelling a little. (I pressed the Coke can on it.) Gus just sat there in a stupor.
The sun shone in the sky (total blue). We burned through some awesome, amazing, totally un-Midwestern hills and crossed over this big, fat chunk of forest-stuffed water called Nickajack Lake—which I’ve totally never seen anything like, except sort of by the Mississippi in Dubuque (and Nickajack was much bigger and grander)—until we got to Chattanooga, which actually has what I think are mountains. I think. Not like Colorado TV mountains, but there were pretty dang tall spots on these ridges.
Chattanooga. There’s something funny about Chattanooga. Gus used to sing this line over and over and over to the tune of “Chattanooga Choo Choo”: “Pardon me, Roy, is that the cat that chewed your new shoes?” He sang this dumb line instead of the “Chattanooga Choo Choo” lyrics (Pardon me, boy, is that the Chattanooga choo choo?). I looked over at Gus when we got to the “Welcome to Chattanooga” sign, and I sang it to him, “Pardon me, Roy, is that the cat that chewed your new shoes?”
“Yeah,” Gus nodded. “I was just thinking about that too.”
Then Gus’s iPhone beeped. “Maddie?” I asked.
“Dad. He wants to know how the trip to Ann Arbor went.”
“You tell him just super, okay? Really super.”
“Ha.” Gus swallowed and looked out to his right, stared off into nothingness.
Then I got a little worried about Jerri calling my phone. I’d really have liked to use Gus’s to call her, but I felt nervous about asking him because he was a little psycho, apparently. Then I felt a bit anxious. Then I kept driving, feeling nerves about Jerri building up in my body until I was seriously anxious.
While the nerves built and boiled, we didn’t say crap, just drove, for like two hours—all the way, Aleah, to Atlanta, Georgia, which is a freaking giant-ass city that doesn’t look like Chicago at all (spread out forever and ever without the totally intense downtown or waterfront and rivers).
Right around the time we hit the first mighty Atlanta suburbs Gus said, looking down at his phone, “Oh. I think the time changed. Yeah, definitely. iPhone changed. It’s an hour later than I thought it was. We’re in the East for real.”
I nodded and responded, “You know I could have you arrested for aggravated assault, you ass.”
“Probably should add criminal damage to property while you’re at it,” Gus said.
“What?”
“Criminal damage.”
“Really?” I was a little confused. “Did you take a dump in my shoe or something?”
“You left your phone charger out on the floor last night, so I cut it into little pieces and then flushed it down the motel toilet.”
“Oh my God,” I said. My hands and feet got icy, which I believe is an indication of complete terror.
“I’ve been kind of crazy today, I think,” Gus said. “I’ve done some bad stuff.” He started sniffling again. “It’s…It’s unpardonable…It’s…You’re really my only friend, man. Not just today. Remember that poster of you and Roy Ngelale? That sort of gross sex picture that was all over the school?”
“Yes.”
“Shit, man.” Gus shook his head. “I did it.”
“Well…” I didn’t say that I pretty much knew it was him. For some reason, the poster didn’t bother me that much. “Now you cut up my phone charger and punched my face.”
“Yes,” he said.
“What’s next? Are you going to stab me or shoot me?” I asked. It was a serious question. I really wanted to know, so I could pull over, jump out, and run the hell away. (Not that I’d run away for real, just flag down the cops to get the necessary doctors to put Gus in a psych ward, I guess.)
“No. No, Felton,” Gus said. “I don’t know why you couldn’t have just waited at the car last night.”
“Because you were gone…”
“You’re always going off somewhere. I just wanted to see a few songs and then come back out to tell you about how cool it all was, so you’d think I’m cool or whatever, and then take off in the damn car on our awesome trip, but you had to go and find a whole new set of friends in like two minutes, which…sucks. And then I waited for you for two hours in the car, which is what I always do—wait for you, man.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously,” Gus said. “I seriously cut up your phone charger with my pocket knife.”
“Ha-ha.” I wasn’t really laughing.
“I don’t know…” Gus trailed off.
“Seriously,” I said. “Are you going to try to kill me?”
“No. I want to visit Martin Luther King’s grave. It’s here in Atlanta.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes.”
“But you just punched me.”
“Yes.”
“Martin Luther King is about nonviolence.”
“I’m aware of that, Felton.”
Gus rolled down his window, and the hottest freaking air ever poured into the car. He lit a cigarette, then said, “I don’t want to smoke. I want to be a good person.” He threw the cigarette out the window and rolled it back up.
“Smoking doesn’t make you a bad person.”
“Not what I want. Do you mind if we stop at the grave?”
“I guess not,” I said. This is not something I was expecting, Aleah.
Using his magical iPhone, Gus figured out where the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site was and his birth house and grave site, and after some fairly craptastic traffic, we pulled off the interstate and got there in just about no time. All the MLK stuff is pretty much right off I-75 (the interstate that would take us all the way into Fort Myers in the south part of the Dangling Baggie).
Martin Luther King’s grave is on this brick circle sitting in the middle of this cool blue pool. You can’t walk right up and touch it or anything. It’s weird to think Martin Luther King is in there. The real one, you know? Shot dead, Martin Luther King. A totally selfless person who gave up his life.
It’s pretty sobering, you know? I sit around telling my brother he should be a pharmacist, while people are out there doing good until they get killed?
• • •
Shouldn’t I be doing something for kids who get beat up? I have no idea what I’d do, Aleah, but here I am in the damn night with Zombie Renee. We’re traveling through darkest Georgia. This is me. I can do things, you see? I can do different things with my time. I don’t have to watch beach volleyball on TV. I don’t have to sit on my ass with Jerri making snide comments about people on HGTV. Maybe.
• • •
It was too damn hot in that sun out at the grave, but Gus stood there letting all the rays beat down on him. He sweated so hard that drips started hanging off the end of his hair wad, which looked pretty funny. I might’ve mentioned this fact to him, but he was very serious and quiet. After awhile I said, “I’ve got to get some water, man.”
He nodded and handed me the keys. “I’ll meet you in the parking lot in a few minutes.”
I didn’t have to wait very long. Gus came stumbling out before I had even aired out the car from the ridiculous heat (doors all open). I handed him a bottle of water that I got at the gift shop.
“Thanks,” he said.
“You feeling better?”
“A little. You know I wrote like a twenty page paper on Martin Luther King in seventh grade?”
“Yeah. Vaguely remember.”
“I was totally set to try to be like him, to bring good shit into the world.”
“That’s good. You still will, man.”
“Yeah, but I spend half my time chasing around a punk girl who thinks the height of awesome is drinking her mom’s vodka, because all I really want to do…really, man, all I want to do is like put her in my mouth.”
“Maddie? In your mouth?”
“Yeah. And I spent like thirty hours making a nasty poster of you, and I punched your face and cut up your cord.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t really know what I’m doing, man.”
“Don’t look at me. I have no idea what’s going on ever.”
“Yeah, Felton. I know that.” Gus said. “I can’t really blame you for anything, can I?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You have a curse,” Gus said.
“I do?”
“Yeah. You have the curse of the monkey king.”
“What?”
“You stopped riding your bike to school with me. You don’t come over for movie night anymore. You missed my birthday. You don’t answer my texts.”
“Why did I stop doing all that?” I said pretty much to myself.
“I don’t know,” Gus replied.
• • •
But, Aleah, I do know. Here I am thinking about it a month or so later, and I do. I really can be blamed for stuff. I don’t have a curse. I’m just me, the damn center of my own head-stuck-in-my-bunghole universe. Narcissus, the mythical dude who all narcissists are named after, loved himself so damn much he couldn’t stop staring at his own reflection in the water.
Sorry. I’m so sorry for everything to everybody.
It’s good I’m on my way back down to pick up Andrew.