Brock Clarke - Exley

“You missed advanced reading today,” J. said.

“I know.”

“Did you have an excuse?”

“Not really.”

“Mrs. T. is going to kill you.”

“She said that?”

“She didn’t have to,” J. said.

“How do you know, then?”

“I used my mine-duh, Miller,” J. said, and then laughed again. I realized again that I liked her. I really liked her. But I wondered if she was too young for me. K. was so much older than me that it seemed stupid to even worry about it. But J. was only five years older. There was a long piece of honey brown hair hanging from her right shoulder. I really wanted to pull it off and see whether it was her hair or her sweater’s. But I was afraid she’d catch me at it, and then I would have to explain what it was I thought I was doing. And I wouldn’t be able to, because I wouldn’t know, exactly. I would need her to know. But she wouldn’t know, either, probably. That’s what I meant when I wondered whether J. was too young for me.

Anyway, since J. was going to the hospital, I decided I would, too, before I went home. The automatic doors worked, unlike the night before. The lobby was lit like normal. The woman at the front desk was Mrs. C., the same one as two days ago, not the one who saw me in my dad’s empty room. Everything was the same as it always was, and not like it was the night before, in my head, which made me even more sure that it had only been in my head. J. and I said hi to Mrs. C.; she said hi back to J.; to me she said, in a singsongy, aren’t-you-a-naughty-boy way, “I heard someone was somewhere he shouldn’t have been last night.”

When adults talk to you this way, they want you to respond either in a way that confirms that you are, in fact, an idiot kid, or in a way that suggests that you aren’t, but I didn’t know Mrs. C. well enough to know which way I should respond to her, so I didn’t say anything. Besides, whoever she was talking about, it couldn’t have been me, because I’d only been to the hospital in my head. I was still trying to think this way. Mrs. C. just smiled at me, though, like it didn’t matter how or if I responded, which sort of made me scared. “It’s OK,” she said. “Your father’s in his room now. And I’ll tell Dr. I. you’re here. I know he wants to talk to you.” This made me even more scared, especially since I assumed Dr. I. was my dad’s doctor, and there was a reason I hadn’t asked to talk to my dad’s doctor yet: because if I didn’t talk to his doctor, then I wouldn’t have to know how sick he was. And now that it seemed like I was going to have to hear it anyway, I didn’t want to be alone with my dad and the doctor when it happened.

“Do you want to meet my dad?” I asked J.

She had already started to peel off to go to the second floor. But when I asked her that, she stopped, turned, and looked at me with her eyebrows raised, like she was wondering if I was really serious. Suddenly, I felt like a little kid; suddenly, I regretted asking her in the first place. But then she smiled, hooked her thumbs into the halves of her sweater and pulled them toward me, the way I’d seen bigwigs do in the movies with their suspenders, and said, “I’d be honored.” Together we walked through the swinging doors, down the hall, and then into my dad’s room.

My dad was there, in bed. There was a thick white bandage around his head. There seemed to be more tubes running from his arm to the pouches hanging near the bed. There seemed to be more pouches, too. And there was a brand-new tube: it ran from my dad’s nose to a new machine between the stand holding the pouches and the bed. The machine looked like a microwave: it had glass in the front and dials and numbers that were lit and going up, then down, then up. The machine whirred like a bird flapping its wings in a cage. Somebody had shaved my dad’s face, like usual. A Fan’s Notes was still on the table next to his bed, and the Dixie cups were still gone.

“This is my dad!” I said, trying so hard to make my voice sound like it was saying, Ta-da ! I turned to J., who was standing behind me. Her left arm was across her chest and under her right armpit, holding the two halves of her sweater together that way. Her right hand was covering her mouth. I saw her seeing my dad. I saw her seeing the bandaged head, the tubes, the pouches. I could hear the new machine whir and whir. “Dad,” I said, turning back to him. “This is J. She’s in my advanced reading class.”

J. walked up and stood next to me. I thought she was going to introduce herself or say hi to my dad or something, but she didn’t. “Is he OK?” she finally asked.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“What happened to his head?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “They operated on him last night. Dr. I. is coming in to talk to me about it today.”

“I know,” J. said. “I heard Mrs. C. tell you that.” My dad’s head was facing where we were standing. J. bent over, put her hands on her knees, got close to my dad’s face, and studied it for a long time.

“You know,” she finally said, “you look a lot like your dad.”

“I do?” I said. I couldn’t believe it! No one had ever said that we looked alike. Before my dad went into the army and then into the VA hospital, he had a round face and usually a beard. Now it was bare and thin, like mine. I was so happy that J. said that. So I kissed her. I didn’t even think about it beforehand. I kissed her right on the top of the head. J. must have sensed something was going on, though. She stood up straight just as I kissed her, and the top of her head cracked right into my teeth. We stood there, not really looking at each other: me holding my mouth, J. rubbing the top of her head.

“What’s that smell?” J. finally said.

I smelled it, too. It was the room; it smelled like a sick person’s room, and it also smelled like the really powerful chemicals they must use to try to make a room not smell like a sick person’s room. I mean, the whole hospital smelled like that. But my dad’s room smelled much worse, and much worse than before he’d had his surgery. It smelled like something had gone so wrong that nothing could ever make it smell right again. But I didn’t want to say that, so instead I said, “I don’t smell anything.”

“Really?” J. said in a disgusted voice. I looked at her. She still wasn’t looking at me. I couldn’t tell if she was mad at me for kissing her or if the smell really bothered her that much. She was fingering her scar now. “How can you not smell anything?”

I really didn’t want to talk about the smell anymore, and it was making me mad that J. kept talking about it anyway, so I said, “Where’d you get that scar anyway?”

J. immediately stopped fingering it. She glared at me for a second or two, then looked away, toward my dad again.

“I’m sorry,” I said. J. didn’t say anything back. She leaned down to look at my dad up close again. I thought she was going to say it was nice to meet him or something. But she didn’t. She just turned away from him and me and started to walk out of the room. “Where are you going?” I asked. J. didn’t answer. Maybe because it was obvious. “Hey, how’s your dad doing?”

“He’s coming home today,” J. said.

“That’s great!” I said. But by then she’d already left the room and left me alone with my dad and my thoughts. I didn’t want to remember what I’d just said about J.’s scar, and I didn’t want to think too much about what this Dr. I. would say about my dad, either. So I decided to make some more lists. These lists would be of Exley’s favorite and least favorite places and things, so that after I found him in Alex Bay, I’d remember where to go and where to stay away from, what subjects to talk about and what subjects to avoid.