Cracking the Bell Page 6

  I missed her.

  Shit. I shut my eyes.

  Grace.

  CHAPTER 14

  GRACE

  “I’ve been thinking about love and my general lack of romance, lately,” Joey said while we were up on ladders, pulling years of leaves and assorted debris from Barb Larson’s gutters. “There aren’t many possible partners out there for me, bro. I’m way ahead of my time, you know? I’m a wise old man in a glowing and beautiful newbie’s body. What a waste of temple space.” Joey happened to be shirtless (he worked without a shirt all summer, which just turned his bony white chest pink). He pointed at himself. “Look at my beauty, dude. I’m a hot young slice of bacon, am I not?”

  “I know,” I said. “You’re a sexy temple.”

  “Waste.” He shook his head. “I bet I get plenty of love when I’m, like, forty, though.”

  “Probably. Can’t wait. We’ll double-date.”

  “You? You won’t find love, bro. I mean, when’s the last time you had girlfriend or a boyfriend?”

  “You know the answer to that.”

  “Right. Your mom is your girlfriend.”

  “Dude. Stop. Twiggs and Riley keep saying that crap and it’s starting to piss me off.”

  “You don’t get pissed. You probably smile and laugh, like it doesn’t bother you that they perceive the vicious truth about you and your mom girlfriend.”

  “Seriously. Stop.”

  “It’s pretty gross, though, bro.” Joey laughed.

  “I don’t have room. I’m not over Grace.”

  “Oh, Bonnie? You miss her, Clyde? Can’t find another suitable partner in crime?”

  “I don’t want another partner in crime,” I said. “I just like Grace.”

  “What do you want? I’ll get you a Tinder profile. Let’s get you out on the love market.”

  “No. Just her,” I said. “Only her.”

  “Dude. That’s effed. She’s just Grace, some townie screwup like every other kid here. Why the hell is she such a big deal?”

  I thought for a second. “I don’t really know,” I said.

  “Green notebook, you big-brained ape,” Joey said. “Search your feelings, Luke.”

  “Thanks. I will, Yoda.”

  “Darth Vader said that, man! It’s like you don’t know your bible at all!”

  Bonnie and Clyde

  He’d crushed on her from the moment she went to work for Grandma. That was right before Hannah died. He and Grace hooked up for the first time six months after Hannah, when Grace had just turned sixteen and he was fourteen. They’d been closing Dairy Queen all winter together, just the two of them.

  Part of the deal Grandma had made with Grace was that Grace had to give little grandson, Isaiah, a ride home after they finished each shift, which meant their nights together could go on and on. Isaiah was a messed-up kid. Grace was in control of his time.

  Which was fine with him. Isaiah and Grace got along really well. Like, too well. Like, they were one person with one deviant brain. At some point, she started pouring her mom’s vodka into a water bottle and bringing it with her so they could get buzzed while they cleaned. Then, one night, they kissed. The next they made out. Then they got buzzed and messed around every single night.

  Grace was always such a worker, though, so thorough, it still looked like they were doing a good job. She was a functioning addict.

  Isaiah wanted to brag to his dipshit friends, Reid and Ben, about her, but Grace told him if he told anyone she would never speak to him again. He listened. She was an older girl and her presence in his life promised all this incredible pleasure, which he needed. His mom was wrecked back then, still crying for Hannah every day. His dad, who had been hilarious, gregarious, had gone totally silent for Hannah. Grandma Gin hadn’t recovered from the loss of Grandpa John. No one seemed to care that Isaiah was in danger of flunking out of eighth grade or going to jail—he was already seeing a court-ordered social worker after getting busted for burning Christmas trees in Smith Park, for God’s sake! No way he would go against anything Grace said. He needed her so much. To her, he could say he dreamed of his sister, Hannah, opening presents under the Christmas tree, riding her bike super fast on the street in front of their house, playing the board game Sorry! with Isaiah and Grandpa. Grace would listen. Grace would hug him. Grace would say, “It’s cool you liked Hannah so much. She was pretty awesome. I know it.” Grace was the only person on the planet who looked at him, listened to him, and smiled at him.

  She didn’t seem to need him at all but kept coming back to him again and again. So, she probably really did need him, but . . .

  In April, she agreed to go to prom with a kid named Caleb Wilson, who used to come over to Isaiah’s house to study with Hannah. Isaiah wanted to beat Caleb up, maybe kill him, but he didn’t do anything, because he needed Grace to like him. Then, after prom, Grace decided she liked Caleb enough to call him her boyfriend. It killed Isaiah, made him retch in the bathroom. Repeatedly.

  Maybe Isaiah would’ve gotten over it, but Grace didn’t cut him off. She kept messing with him, bringing vodka for him, making out with him at the end of shifts, but being mean to him right after, sometimes screaming at him. She stopped wanting to hear about how he missed Hannah. She’d say, “I can’t deal with your ghost world right now.”

  Isaiah felt sick all the time. He broke the driver’s side mirror off Caleb Wilson’s car one night. Then, in May, Grace’s estranged stepfather moved back into their house and Grace made Isaiah hide a bottle of vodka.

  “I can’t hide it in my room. Richie will find it. He comes in, digs through my shit all the time.”

  “I don’t want it,” Isaiah said. “You want my mom to find it? Keep it in your car.”

  “Caleb might find it in my car. He’ll break up with me. You know what my grade is like.”

  Isaiah did know. The smart kids in Grace’s class were all militant against alcohol, because of what happened to Ray Gatos and Hannah. They joined FOCUS, DARE, SADD. They signed pacts saying they’d never drink.

  “I hope Caleb breaks up with you,” Isaiah said. “It would be good for him if he broke up with you.”

  “Come on,” she whispered in his ear. “Please? Just hide the bottle. You can have some.” So, Isaiah took the bottle home.

  Three days later he found out Grace was going with Caleb’s family on a trip to Chicago. The following day Isaiah’s parents went to Dubuque for a marriage therapy session. While they were gone, Isaiah drank what was left of the vodka (a half liter) and he nearly died (after breaking all this shit in his own kitchen, not Caleb’s). Dad found him naked, bleeding, passed out on the floor of the basement shower. Isaiah got a trip to the emergency room. There, his social worker suggested he spend time at a dry group home.

  Grace had troubles, but she was very good at hiding her troubles. Isaiah was not good at hiding his trouble at all.

  He continued to love Grace, even though she was the source of more trouble. Mom tried to pry out of him where the booze had come from, but Isaiah would not tell.

  In fact, nobody would’ve known about Grace’s hand in his demise if she hadn’t confessed her sins to Mom a few years later, when Isaiah was a sophomore in high school. This confession was part of Grace’s AA program.

  Mom was not nice about it. Mom lost her mind. She wanted to hire a lawyer. Press charges.

  “Press what charges?” Isaiah asked. “Aiding and abetting my teenaged delinquency while being a teenager?”

  Mom asked Grandma to fire Grace. But Grandma wouldn’t.

  “She’s my best worker and she needs my help.”

  Mom refused to let Isaiah ever work at Dairy Queen again. Mom wrote nasty things about Grace on Facebook (without using Grace’s name, but all the townies on Facebook knew). But the truth is, Mom didn’t know even the beginning about him and Grace. Even after football, after he got clean, he’d sometimes meet with her, drive out to the Belmont Tower with her, climb up to the top, where they could
be alone. They talked, mostly. Grace knew the real Isaiah better than just about anyone.

  So Isaiah had these feelings for Grace. They wouldn’t go away.

  Back during the summer after eighth grade, when she was “dating” Caleb and he got sent away to a group home, he felt addicted to her like a drug. In fact, the first four weeks he was in the home (between fistfights and smoke breaks), Isaiah writhed from missing Grace. He couldn’t sleep at night. His insides longed for her. He considered killing himself to get her attention. When the social workers gave him his phone (one hour every night), he texted her. He called her. He left pleading messages. She responded with a one-word text, Relax. He texted, What if I die? She responded, Just don’t. But he really thought he might die.

  Thankfully he went to group counseling every day. During week four, he spoke about Grace in counseling. He spoke about Mom and about Hannah and about Dad. The counselors listened. Some of the other dudes his age listened. They all talked. Gave him advice. He started thinking that maybe he was trying to replace Hannah with Grace and that was weird as hell and it could only be a bad scene. Grace wasn’t his family. She was just a girl he met at work. He began to let her go. Tried so hard. Then Mom decided to bring him home, because he’d somehow managed to pass eighth grade and high school would be a new start for him. For all of them. She missed him. She needed to have her baby home. . . .

  When Isaiah returned at the end of July, he tried to stay away from Grace, because he understood their relationship was bad for him.

  The family made him go back to work at Dairy Queen, though. This was long before Grace confessed, so no one else knew. The family thought work would keep him grounded. “Can’t hang out with those idiots Ben and Reid if you’re cleaning Dairy Queen bathrooms,” Dad had said.

  Bad move. Grace wouldn’t stay away from him. She and Caleb had broken up. The breakup was because she missed Isaiah, she said. She realized that Caleb couldn’t replace Isaiah, didn’t hold a candle to Isaiah. She never even really liked Caleb, had only wanted to be with someone in her own grade.

  And Isaiah just couldn’t deal. The daily group counseling he received in Muscoda didn’t give him the structure he needed to handle her. One night Grace cornered him by the dumpster behind the store. She cried, like really sobbed. She said she didn’t have anyone in the world to talk to and she needed to be with someone who liked her—everybody hated her—and now she’d even made Isaiah hate her.

  “I don’t hate you. I would never hate you,” Isaiah said.

  “Thanks, man,” she cried. “Thank you.”

  They hugged. Isaiah felt like he’d come home.

  Two nights later, they closed the store together. Although Isaiah was hesitant, he accompanied Grace to a cornfield keg party in a nearby town. The party was busted by county sheriffs. Isaiah was hauled to jail with a dozen other kids. The next day, his dad gave him the ultimatum. Play football or go back to Muscoda. Muscoda seemed like the right choice. Isaiah felt safe in Muscoda. But Dad gave him football and football gave him structure, a place, an identity, a reason. And so, here he is, a football player who doesn’t work at Dairy Queen and doesn’t ever talk to the love of his life.

  “Ha,” Joey said after he read that in my green notebook. “Come on! You’re eighteen, bro. Love of your life? You don’t know who the love of your life is.” We were sitting at Badger Coffee, supposedly planning out how much paint we’d need to cover a shed in Potosi.

  “I’m not eighteen. Not until October. And I don’t care. I want Grace or no one and I’m not going to be with Grace, so I only play football.”

  “Football! Football! You’re into monoculture!”

  “Mono what?” I asked. “What the hell?”

  “Okay. Listen. Like in farming? Monoculture is efficient. If you’re a farmer? Only grow corn, bro. That’s simple, cheap. Only need certain equipment and chemicals and whatnot. But what happens if a plague of corn-eating grasshoppers comes for your crops? You have nothing else to eat or sell at the market?”

  “You’re comparing me to a farmer?”

  “No. You could be a factory town. Coal-mining town. Farming town. Doesn’t matter. Each based on a single damn industry. They boom when times are good, but when things change, they die. Ghost town. Spiders and cobwebs and crooked tombstones by the empty church, right? All because they placed a bet on a single damn way of being. Wrong choice! Places need polyculture to protect themselves from change. Places need a diversified economic base, dude. Corn price goes to shit? Corn dies from too much rain? No worries. We have beans and cows and ham sandwiches. We have so much life! Our tombstones will be taken care of! Point is, without football, you’ve got no life, Isaiah. So you see ghosts. Hannah and Grace, right?”

  “How much paint do we need to paint that damn shed?” I asked.

  Back home, my day off to catch up on homework, I lay on the kitchen floor. Grace smoked a cigarette a backyard away from me? Right now?

  What if this nightmare doesn’t die? I wondered. What if Mom called Coach Reynolds today without telling me? What if football-eating grasshoppers are coming for my football crop?

  If that happened, my energy wouldn’t be destroyed. It would have to be transformed.

  Maybe you should go talk to Grace, I said to myself.

  I stood up, looked out the window.

  She was gone.

  CHAPTER 15

  OCTOBER 3: WEDNESDAY

  By Wednesday morning, I was caught up with schoolwork. Other than being rocked by the sight of Grace, the day before had been okay. If someone asked, I’d have said, “No, sir. No dizziness. No headaches. No sensitivity to light or sounds.” I would not have mentioned Grace smoking a cigarette at Grandma’s. I would not have mentioned me falling onto the floor and lying there for fifteen minutes. I would not have mentioned football-eating grasshoppers and the fate of tombstones in ghost towns.

  So as not to set off any alarm bells, I texted Riley and took a ride in for weight lifting. I couldn’t tell him the doctor said no working out of any kind. I couldn’t tell him the thought of working out remained unappealing. So, once there, I claimed I needed to stretch instead of lift, because my illness had left me feeling tight and in danger of straining a muscle.

  “What?” Riley said. “Stretching isn’t a workout.”

  “Some forms of yoga are aerobic,” I said.

  “Are you going to do yoga? Did your mom teach you yoga now?”

  “No, dude. I’m just tight. Give me a break. Yoga is dumb.”

  I don’t really think yoga is dumb. Mom does it and it helps her with sciatica pain.

  I went to stretch by myself. After, Riley asked if I wanted to leave during lunch, to grab a sandwich at Subway.

  “I’m pretty behind on schoolwork,” I said. The idea of having a conversation did not appeal to me. At lunch, we’d talk about the River Valley game. We’d probably talk about the bigger game, Prairie du Chien, coming up a week later. We might talk about other teams in the state doing well, teams we might meet in the playoffs. We might talk about college. Minnesota State and Northern Iowa were recruiting Riley hard. Coach Conti from Cornell had texted me the night before, had asked when was a good time to have a phone call with my parents, and I hadn’t responded. If Riley mentioned any of these topics, I would freeze. I couldn’t deal with that possibility. “I’m going to head to the library for lunch, I guess,” I said.

  “Aw, come on, dude,” Riley said. “You’re going to get into college. You’re fine.”

  “I haven’t done the reading assignment for Human Geography,” I said.

  “I did it,” Riley said. “Here. Listen. I’ll tell you all about it. You know why New York City has so many people all living on top of each other like rats? It developed before cars. They couldn’t get too far away from their jobs so they had to pile on top of each other. That got easier when elevators were invented. Then they piled way up high in the sky. Make sense? Everybody had to be in walking distance from everything, okay?”


  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  “No. Come on. Northern Iowa called me last night. I’m going to visit, man. I want to talk to you about it. Twiggs just says, ‘Duuude, awesome.’ Northern Iowa is D-I! Maybe they’d want to talk to you, too?”

  “Jesus. I said I have to read,” I spat.

  Riley’s face turned red. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he asked.

  “Sorry. I’m stressed. From being sick. And school. Sorry.”

  “Whatever,” Riley said. He walked away.

  The rest of Wednesday was not okay.

  There were times during different class periods where my mind wandered or shut down. I got the cold sweats a few times. I felt a little dizzy and nauseous. I thought about Cornell. I thought about Northern Iowa. I thought about my mom and Coach Reynolds. I thought about losing my life. I thought about Grace in my backyard and about her and me up at Belmont Tower alone.

  By the end of the day, I was exhausted. And then, I realized, I had to go to football practice if I was going to pretend it all wasn’t happening, to give me more time to work things out. It somehow only occurred to me at that moment—in Human Geography, trying to stay awake through a movie about shantytowns in South America—that I’d have to tell the coaches something, because I couldn’t actually practice. My body didn’t want me to practice. I couldn’t go home sweaty, even if I was okay—Mom would lose her mind if I participated in football. And the doctor said I had to take the week off. . . .

  My head was legitimately injured. My brain, injured. I was losing myself. My life.

  Nobody, outside of me, the doctor, Mom, and Dad knew anything about anything.

  Why wasn’t I fighting Mom about making me quit? Why wasn’t I telling people about my injury? What was happening to me?

  For the first time, I got legitimately scared. My brain really couldn’t be functioning right, even if I couldn’t feel it malfunctioning, exactly. I had no excuse for sitting out of practice. Not just Wednesday but Thursday, too. What would I say about the game Friday? What was I going to do about what came after? How could I hide from this terrible thing happening in my life? I couldn’t face it. I couldn’t deal. I began to feel panic rising in my chest.