GUS

“SHE’S VIOLA AFTER the wreck, Portia defending Antonio!” Phil shouts over The Two Towers OST blaring through blown speakers. “Éowyn on the fields of Pelennor!”

“But wasn’t, um, Kalyn? Wasn’t she a girl both times you saw her?”

“Shakespeare’s gender benders are the easiest analogies at my disposal, Gus. And the last example was Tolkien. I’m merely admiring that, like many heroines, this girl has adopted a disguise to hide her secret identity. Obviously our heroine should be feminine.”

Obviously? Phil might default to being smitten by girls, but smiting is hazier for me. There was something arresting about Kalyn throwing an egg at us, about her tangled red hair and arching eyebrows and unfounded anger. But there was something just as arresting about Garth of the Gaggle when I saw him today. Garth, beside the drinking fountain, laughing in a way that echoed in my skull, wearing a kilt that fit him so loosely that I wished I could adjust it for him.

I think most people are arresting. Girls, boys, everyone. People.

“Do you think she is taken with me?”

“No idea.” I move my seat belt so it doesn’t crush my dead arm.

If this was a gender-bending story and not real life, and this wild-eyed girl on the steps was everything Phil wants her to be, maybe things could change for us. But Kalyn isn’t a heroine. She’s a short-tempered hillbilly passing for sweet.

If I’m bitter, it’s because she is passing. All Kalyn had to do was change her hair, and voilá, carefreedom! All the Doc Martens in the world couldn’t do that for me.

I don’t want to talk about Kalyn. It’s not what she said so much as the way she looked at us. She was sandpaper and we were bits of wood.

Phil’s driving the Death Van (named after the Death Star painted on its side) with one hand, waving the other like he’s directing a symphony. “It does support my theorizing, doesn’t it?” Phil reaches for a warm Powerade and swigs it. “We’re the only ones who know who she really is!”

“We don’t know who she ‘really is,’ ” I murmur.

“She’s Kalyn,” Phil says reverently. “Kalyn, the catalyst.”

“Oh, what’s in a name,” I snap. Phil ignores my tone to correct me. Phil can’t help himself when it comes to Shakespeare. As he’s told me “tenfold,” people constantly misquote that line, or at least, he says, swerving around a tractor, misinterpret it.

“. . . ​people use it to imply a name has nothing to do with who someone is, which is the opposite of what Shakespeare intended.” He should put both hands on the wheel. Imagine having two good arms and abusing them like that. “We are in an entirely novel position. We, the only half-faced pignuts in school to whom she disclosed her true identity!”

“Could you turn down the music?”

Phil doesn’t. He’s tapping his fingers on the wheel, so quickly that watching it borders on nauseating. “Should we have offered her transport, Gus?”

“No.” My limbs ache. “She didn’t even ask our names.”

The vehicle squeals like a dying pig when Phil hits the brakes at the main downtown intersection. A prop ax from the back flies forward, whacking my elbow.

Phil’s the third brother to drive this van, and not the first to drive it ragged. There are traces of all the Wheeler siblings here: Matt’s painted Death Star, John’s empty reels of film bouncing around the back, the gum stuck along the ceiling behind us in an incomplete rainbow spectrum. Where most people have a middle seat, a grubby pile of blankets and prop swords from weekends at Ren Faire coat the carpet.

“Gus, if only I’d had the gall to speak to her as you did.”

I avert my eyes. The local ice cream shop is already closed for autumn, but the barber pole is still spinning.

“I envy you. Girls always want to speak to you.”

I freeze. It has nothing to do with the stop sign Phil just ran. “No. They don’t.”

“How many girls spoke to you today? Tell me truly.”

“You mean how many people, um. How many—tried to carry things for me?”

“Yes, you despise that.” Now we’re barreling through my subdivision. “But can’t you see the benefits? People wish to speak to you. People find you interesting, Gus.”

“For the wrong reasons.” I shouldn’t have to explain this to Phil. Phil, who sat with me for hours and helped me read words in order. Phil, who shut off The Elephant Man when it made me bawl for reasons untold.

“Do people ever wish to speak to me? Do they ever think I’m interesting, apart from the allure of shoving my face into toilets?”

“I think you’re interesting,” I whisper.

But I know what he’s telling me. Things got bad for Phil somewhere around seventh grade. Phil’s acne started bubbling up full force, making moon craters and sinkholes of his face. This attracted more winces than my dead-rightness ever has.

Josh Erickson and a few other guys had a lot of fun pockmarking all Phil’s stuff.

“You want everything to match, right, fag?” Josh said, after he hole-punched and knifed holes through Phil’s messenger bag.

“You’re the one into fashion, Gus,” Phil said dully, picking circular bits of leather off the speckled floor. For years he’d been delivering magazines to me, Vogue and GQ, plopping them on my desk after his dad recycled them from clinic waiting rooms.

I tried to help, but I can hardly kneel on a good day, and the stress made that anything but. Phil asked me to abandon him to his quest.

Now I don’t know what he’s asking for. Phil’s slowing down at last. He knows better than to screech his tires in Tamara’s presence.

Tamara’s back from work, sitting on the patio. The paneling behind her looks white and warm in the fading sun. The ivy’s browning at last.

“Phil. What do you want me to do?”

“It’s the essence of simplicity.” Phil spins in his seat. “I want you to be my messenger. My ‘wingman.’ I want you, gifted with automatic intrigue, to use your silver tongue to speak to Kalyn the Catalyst.”

He must mean the neglected, tarnished silver of buried spoons. “Speak to her?”

“Yes. And . . . ​when the moment is right, ask her if she would attend homecoming with me next month?” Phil flushes, and I almost don’t recognize him.

“If you think I could actually help . . .”

I don’t expect him to grab my shoulder. Phil’s palm is hot rather than warm, and I wonder if he doesn’t hold the steering wheel for fear of melting it. Maybe he hardly ever touches me for the same reason. And now I’m getting redder, because who knows why I’m wondering that. There’s more than one way to be a fragile person.

Phil’s hand on my shoulder breaks me. “Please, Gus.”

“Okay. I’ll try.”

Phil is the most spidery weirdo who’s ever lived. But when he smiles, he’s a lighthouse. “I thank you; I am not of many words, but I thank you. Tell her . . . ​I don’t know. Tell her I’m worth more than my face?”

“Yeah.” I clamber out of the car.

I feel queasy as he pulls away. Phil helped me learn to communicate. Even now, if my brain fails to process something, Phil clears pathways for me. He’s only asking a favor any friend would ask. And Phil isn’t just any friend.

I wonder if Phil knows that he was already a catalyst in the story of my life.

When I step into the yard, Tamara’s still on the patio, sunk into her chair cushions. I hobble up the ramp to join her.

“What’s up? You knock ’em dead today?”

“I had an egg thrown at me.”

She bristles. “I need to be knocking on someone’s door?”

“No. It was an accident. Eggcident. Everything okay here?”

“ ‘Okay’ is exactly the word, my man. Phil didn’t want dinner?”

I sink into a wicker chair across from her. I can tell that it’s going to suck taking off my AFO tonight. “Nah. He’s got a lot on his mind today.”

“That sounds nice and cryptic, hon.”

What do people do when their best friends fall in love? This is new territory, and rocky ground has never done me any favors. But the curdling in my stomach is new. If I had to give it a name, I’d call it resentment. It isn’t fair to Phil.

This is what friends do. Friends are wingmen. Friends are brotherly. It doesn’t make me the crippled side note. It doesn’t.

“. . . inside, but tiptoe a little.”

“Sorry?”

“Don’t tell me I’ve been talking to crickets.” Tamara’s eyes are red, and I suspect that’s not just coffee in her mug. “I said, your mom’s having a bit of a day, too.”

I frown. “Is it the anniversary of something?”

“Apparently it’s the day the trial ended. September seventh, way back when. She’s been digging through those boxes all day.”

I think of Mom in the spare room, surrounded by spectral Dad’s eternal eyes, sniffling on a dusty bedspread. We don’t have guests over, not ever. I don’t know what it does to Tamara, no matter what she says about liking my dead dad’s face.

“We could go get chimichangas at El Cajon’s.”

“’Fraid I can’t be driving right now.” Definitely not just coffee in her mug. “Some people would forget a trial anniversary. But your mother, she’s so full of love. She can’t leave mice in traps, let alone forget a handsome dead boy. Guess I’m drawn to that devotion, hon. Helpless moth, ready to burn to ash.”

“You could be a poet, Tam.”

“Nah. I just see a lot of moths out here in the evenings.”

The house has reverted to a tomb. Maybe tomorrow Mom will ask about our days, and we can ask about hers. But not today.

“Let me drive?” I started Driver’s Ed last year, but never finished. And not because it was more difficult than it would be for most people—yeah, I had to see a specialist, and I had to take extra tests that gauged my ability to react to sudden movements, and yeah, one of those tests determined that I wasn’t allowed to drive one-handed without using a steering wheel knob. But none of that stopped me.

What stopped me was me.

I froze during the practical trainings, not because my body locked up but because I felt certain it would, probably on an interstate, or during a sharp turn, or as a child crossed the street.

Tamara hands me her keys. There are a dozen beaded animals in my hand now, handmade by a niece I’ve never met and never will, because Tamara’s family isn’t keen on her bringing her girlfriend and her girlfriend’s disabled son over for holidays.

“You’re okay with catching fire,” I say. “That’s what you’re saying.”

“Son, you’re burning up in it, too.”

Phil’s hands could have melted the steering wheel, melted me. “Yeah, maybe.”

She opens the door for me, not because of my dead side but because Tamara’s got manners. The inside of her truck smells like earth and sweat and floral perfume. Despite her love for vintage trucks, Tamara sold her beloved ’67 C10 and bought an automatic Silverado and installed a left-foot accelerator as soon as I started Driver’s Ed. I settle into the seat and blink at the wheel; she’s refused to remove the spinner knob.

Eating tacos in the neon orange dining area of El Cajon’s, laughing at the sight of Tamara spitting out her cilantro, I make a choice. I’m going to speak to the catalyst, and see what shape her sandpapering leaves me in.

Sandpaper burns, too. But it’s the only way to avoid splinters.