Noggin: Chapters 20–26

No one let me do anything anymore, which was nice but also made me feel even worse about being sick, like I was just there to be a constant inconvenience to everyone.

Younger kids would have called it a shooting star. But we’d reached that age where the science behind it mattered, where the wonders of the universe needed to be further explained to mesmerize us.

But still, it was beautiful and, even though this sounds weird, it made me feel really tiny and insignificant.

He had the radio on and was listening to some slow-paced indie crooner, and I immediately noticed how the truck smelled exactly like his old bedroom, like a combination of patchouli and Old Spice.

He put his stool back and sauntered offstage.

It was amazing, not only how good they sounded but how much fun everyone was having. It was the kind of fun that creeps into your skin and spreads all over your body, and even if you want to be cynical about something, you just can’t manage it.

“So you’re at the law firm still?” I asked.
“Yeah. Umm, I work there three days a week, just mostly clerical stuff while I’m getting my degree.”

I’d say, it was on par with all of our late-night dinners at Steak ’n Shake—only better because it had been too long.

“We were, but she said she didn’t want to intrude on our impromptu reunion.”

At first she just griped about something that happened at work. Someone had been rude to her—one of the lawyers—and she was thinking about trying to find a job someplace else.

I sat on the big puffy arm of my dad’s recliner and let him gain his composure.

That’s how I rationalized it for so long. I convinced myself that I was just thinking the same way every guy thinks...just choosing to wash away thoughts that I shouldn’t be having.

I wanted to be like this couple I saw in a horror movie when I was a kid and be Super Glued to her forever. Only without the murder by the demented serial killer that followed.

I'd call it déjà vu or whatever, but that’s sort of what my whole life was right after I came back. Just one big moment of “Hasn’t this happened before?” that no one else could understand.

Soon enough we were turning into a small parking lot beside the Colonnade at Kessler Park. We used to drive up here all the time, just the two of us. It seemed otherworldly, this massive collection of stone columns that stretched along the road and looked down onto the park.

She could’ve taken me anywhere as long as she kept pulling at me that way, tugging Jeremy Pratt’s arm and making my shoes squeak against the slick linoleum floor with every step.

And maybe it was lame to be so infatuated with a piece of artwork that was so popular, but I didn’t care.

After standing in the same spot for a while, and completely ignoring the several other patrons who wanted to get the dead-on view that I had, I broke my stare and looked over at her with a big smile.

They didn’t have someone like my dad to provide them with factoids about every movie playing on cable, or my mom to paraphrase entire life biographies of Hollywood’s most awarded and acclaimed actors.

She’d only seen bits and pieces of it, but she always remembered the little-girl ghosts and the blood rushing down the hallway and, though Cate usually wasn’t all that squeamish, these images had terrified her as a young child innocently flipping through the channels.

She seemed amazed at how much of it she’d forgotten. She looked at me with these bewildered eyes and held her hand up to her mouth, her fingertips touching her lips.

There are moments in your life when you imagine things happening in slow motion, when your movie- addled mind won’t let you experience things the way they’re actually going down, but instead replaces it with fictional special effects.

If I’d still been there, Kyle wouldn’t have felt compelled to live a lie for so long.

Well, I wanted to tell them both at the same time that I’d been hanging out with her, figuring maybe they’d try to one-up the other as my most supportive friend and I’d be left unscathed in the process.

All I could see was that gawky sixteen-year-old version of him sitting beside my deathbed in the middle of the night, his whole body shaking as he told me the truth.

When Kyle picked me up for our afternoon at Arnie’s Arcade, he looked different from before—he wasn’t dancing and singing or anything, but I thought I noticed some change in his demeanor, like letting go of his secret had lightened him up a bit.

He wore his usual hoodie, zipped halfway up over a T-shirt that said “Are you kitten me?” and had a crude drawing of a cat on it.

And the most harrowing thing I noticed was that my favorite game of all time—Space Invaders—had been replaced by quite possibly the most frightening thing I’d ever seen. It was called Dance Till You Die and there were two middle schoolers, one boy and one girl, doing just that.

But I knew how many tokens it took to play a game, and soon enough I had my hands on the buttons, and I could hear the music that had been the sound track to so many of the afternoons before I got sick—the ominous dun dun dun dun’s that I used to hear in my sleep like echoes from an era that I hadn’t even lived through, an early ’80s electronic metronome.

But I knew how many tokens it took to play a game, and soon enough I had my hands on the buttons, and I could hear the music that had been the sound track to so many of the afternoons before I got sick—the ominous dun dun dun dun’s that I used to hear in my sleep like echoes from an era that I hadn’t even lived through, an early ’80s electronic metronome.

It was Game Over before I could even clear out one level, my score a measly 850.

Then I started breathing really fast. I noticed it first in my chest, like it wouldn’t rise all the way, like my lungs were blocked or something. I sat up and put both hands on the dashboard. I was hyperventilating.

Mom and Dad brought in a huge thing of doughnuts, and the three of us watched some TV while we smothered our emotions with sugar and lard.

“You’d think they could wait a few days, huh?” I said, a little miffed.

Then a faint glow suddenly illuminated the room—he’d haphazardly wrapped an empty IV bag with little twinkling lights, like the ones you see on miniature Christmas trees—and now we all started to count down from ten as he used plastic tubing to raise the bag up from the floor.