Paul Melko - The Walls of the Universe

“Hi, Casey,” he managed to say.

“Be right down.”

Ryan disappeared into the kitchen and John heard: “Casey’s date is here. Are you going to grill him?”

“Hush, dear,” Mrs. Nicholson said.

Mr. Nicholson appeared from the kitchen and approached John with his arm extended. “Hello, John. I’m Casey’s father.”

“Uh, good evening, Mr. Nicholson.” It wasn’t easy remembering that this wasn’t the Mr. Nicholson that John had met once or twice at church and nodded to in passing. He had never met this man.

“Casey has been a bit reticent about you, so you’ll have to give me your detailed curriculum vitae and the last six years of tax returns.” He paused, then laughed. “Just kidding. But do tell me about yourself.”

“I go to the University of Toledo. I’m a freshman, from Findlay. My major is physics.”

He guided John to the living room, nodded. “Uh-huh. Physics. Very respectable. I’m an insurance salesman myself. Tried suffering through calculus and couldn’t.”

John nodded.

“John, hello. I’m Casey’s mother. Can I get you a pop?” Mrs. Nicholson was chubbier than he remembered. She offered him dry hands to shake.

“No thanks, ma’am.”

“Do you have proper insurance on your car, John?” Mr. Nicholson asked.

“I think so.”

“Alex!” Mrs. Nicholson said.

“Just checking to make sure he’s covered,” he said quickly.

“Dad, enough of the grilling,” Casey said from the entryway. She was dressed in a short black dress. A jeans jacket hugged her shoulders. “Let’s go, John.”

“Honey, have a good time.”

Casey grabbed his hand and dragged John out the door.

“My parents are so embarrassing.”

“They’re not so bad.”

Casey gave him a look.

“Your brother told me I wasn’t Jack.”

“Well, you’re not.” As John opened the door, she slid into the car. “Let’s go eat.”

Hilliard Avenue, the main drag, was teeming with life. Teenagers were dressed in all sorts of clothes to attract the opposite sex. Cars cruised the street. He felt a homesickness so sharp he almost felt ill.

A body bounded from the curb sidewalk, and John slammed on the brakes, though he was only going fifteen kilometers per hour on the packed street. His heart thudded in his chest. The seat belt slowly unloosened.

A sweatshirt-hooded teen slammed his palm on John’s car, then flashed him the bird with both hands.

“Hey, Casey!” the teen yelled. He grabbed his crotch.

John realized with a shock that it was Ted Carson.

John gripped the steering wheel with viselike hands. Ted Carson.

“Hey, Casey! Come on out and play!”

“He’s drunk,” Casey said.

Rage seethed inside John. He leaned on his horn, blasting the street with the Trans Am’s alarm.

Carson lifted his foot and slammed the fender of the car. John took his foot off the brake and the car jumped forward a few centimeters.

Carson jumped back but not out of the way. John steered around him and past.

“What an asshole,” Casey said.

“Carson is that.”

“You know him?”

“I’ve run into him a couple times,” John said, remembering the fight the two of them had had, how his mother had manipulated John’s mother into taking Carson’s side, and how he’d been cornered into writing an apology letter for beating the crap out of Ted.

But that wasn’t this Ted Carson.

“He was a year behind me,” Casey said. “He’s dropped out, I think, still in town. I think he works with his father at the appliance plant.”

John watched in the rearview mirror as Carson shot him a double bird again. His friends were laughing from the sidewalk.

“Some things never change,” John said.

“You said it.”

During dinner, at a small restaurant called the Riverview, Casey said, “That Ted Carson really burns me up.”

John shrugged. “He’s a loser, always will be.”

“He tried to hit on me once,” she said.

John felt a moment’s jealousy. “Yeah?”

“At a party in town,” she said. “He grabbed me. I kicked him in the crotch.”

“Good response.”

“It works for most grabby boys,” she said.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“You probably won’t have to worry about it,” she said. John wasn’t sure if that meant she trusted him not to touch her or she was going to let him if he tried.

Remembering what John Prime had told him, he said, “I heard Carson tortured animals.”

“That’s not a nice thing to say!” Casey said.

“During dinner or at all?”

“At all.”

“What if it’s true?” John asked. What was true in one world was probably true in another.

“Have you seen the evidence? With your own eyes?”

“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

“Have you heard ‘innocent until proven guilty’?”

“How many squirrels need to be dissected while still alive for us to know someone’s a bad egg?”

“How many innocents should suffer to capture one bad egg?”

John grinned; then Casey grinned back. She said, “I don’t agree with you, but you’re a lot more interesting to talk to than Jack.”

“Jack?”

“Jack would have jumped right out of the car and laid into Carson.”

“Who the hell is Jack?” John asked. “And why do people keep bringing him up?”

“My ex-boyfriend.”

“Uh-oh. I thought he was just some frat boy from college.”

“He’ll probably be at the dance we’re going to.”

“Dance?”

“Who needs a movie when we can dance?” She smiled. “Oh, wait. I just remembered you like that country and western crap. Too bad.”

John said, “I hear that The Revolutionary War Witch is a great movie.”

“Uh-huh. We’ll catch it next week at the U.”

“So we’re going out again,” John said as casually as he could.

“Despite your views on Ted Carson.”

The dance was at a warehouse next to the railroad tracks over on the east side of town. The warehouse was empty, hidden behind two other buildings, isolated, and perfect for a party.

The music was the rock-and-roll stuff that he usually heard on the radio, bouncy fifties music, and not the hard reverb that would have been impossible to dance to. The teens in his universe would be listening to heavy metal. Here they listened to songs the Big Bopper might have written and sung.

“I suppose you’re gonna tell me you don’t know how to dance,” she said as they walked in past a hulking doorman who waved them right in when he saw Casey. Apparently she was well known at these things.

“I know how to dance,” John said. He didn’t know the bouncing dances that the kids on the floor were doing, but he had been in a play during his sophomore year when he took drama. The play had been called Sock Hop, big on Broadway during the seventies. It featured a number of fifties-style dances, and he’d had to learn the jitterbug. “The question is if you do.”

She looked at him with mock outrage. “Johnny, you amaze me.” She grabbed his arm. “Let’s go.”

He showed her the slow-slow-quick-quick step twice, and she mimicked it gracefully enough; then he grabbed her in promenade and launched into it.

She stumbled once and then she had the hang of it. She’d been a cheerleader and studied dance when she was younger, and the basic steps of the jitterbug were easy. When he spun her out, she squealed, but when she came back in again, her face was lit with a smile.

They danced three dances straight, John adding moves as they went. He was rusty at first too; it had been three years since he’d done it. When he’d learned it for the play, his mother had danced with him in the kitchen, his father looking on and laughing. At least until John’s mother had taken his father’s hand and shown that he too knew the double lindy.