Victor sat back down and faced me.
“He doesn’t mean it, Edward. He’s angry. Confused. There’s a sourness in him that we just have to ride out.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Hormones, maybe. It hasn’t been an easy transition for him, being here. He doesn’t know these kids very well. Junior high is a pretty tough time under the best circumstances, as I recall.”
I nodded. All of school was tough for me—not necessarily the subjects, although some of them were. I didn’t have friends, and that’s hard for a kid. That’s hard for anybody, as I’ve learned since all my friends left Billings. I’ve been so frustrated with Kyle today, and now, remembering what things were like for me thirty years ago, when I was his age, I feel like I understand him. I wouldn’t want him to live through the kinds of things I experienced.
“He’s so big,” I said.
Victor laughed. “Tell me about it. Four inches, at least, since the end of the summer. He wears a size ten shoe. We’ve had to buy new clothes twice.”
“What should I do?” I asked.
Victor’s face went from laughter to solemnity (I love the word “solemnity”) in a single moment.
“To start with, keep being his friend. He needs one. We’ll see how it goes.”
That’s what I’m contemplating here in the darkness. Being Kyle’s friend.
The fact of the matter is that Kyle was my first good friend. Donna and I are close now, and I can feel myself becoming better friends with Victor. But Donna and I didn’t start out that way. I didn’t like Donna when I first met her, and I don’t think she liked me very much, either. Kyle, though, made things fun the first time I met him, on October 15, 2008, when he helped me paint my garage.
Maybe that’s what is missing from Kyle—fun. He looks miserable, and he surely is making his parents miserable. He’s making me miserable, too. As Dr. Buckley would say, that’s an awful lot of power we have given one boy over all of us.
In fairness to Kyle, he’s not the only reason I’m in a bad mood. The Dallas Cowboys really messed up tonight. They led by twelve points, 34–22, with five minutes and forty-one seconds left in the game, and they still managed to lose. Eli Manning passed for one touchdown, and Brandon Jacobs ran for one, and with a two-point conversion, the Giants won 37–34. The Dallas Cowboys blow a lot of big leads. In this case, it wasn’t Tony Romo’s fault—he threw for four touchdowns. A lot of times, though, it is Tony Romo’s fault.
I shake my head and remember that I’m here for Kyle, not for the Dallas Cowboys. I make myself a promise in the dark, but not like the kind in the Pat Benatar song. I promise that I will work hard while I am here to have fun with Kyle, to show him what fun is, to remind him of the good times we used to have together and can have again.
It feels good to have settled on a course of action. It’s 12:48 a.m. now. The fun starts in a few hours.
OFFICIALLY MONDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2011
From the logbook of Edward Stanton:
Time I woke up today: 8:33 a.m. (not counting the hours I stayed up past midnight). Fifth time this year I’ve been awake at this time.
High temperature for Sunday, December 11, 2011, Day 345: 43 (according to the Boise newspaper). Same as the day before.
Low temperature for Sunday, December 11, 2011: 26. Just one degree colder than the day before.
Precipitation for Sunday, December 11, 2011: 0.00 inches
Precipitation for 2011: 19.40 inches
New entries:
Exercise for Sunday, December 11, 2011: None, unfortunately. I drove, I ate, I watched the Dallas Cowboys, I went to bed. I need to rectify this today.
Miles driven Sunday, December 11, 2011: 464.9
Total miles driven: 688.3
Addendum: I’m in Boise now. “Fun” is the key word. Kyle clearly isn’t having any, and neither are his parents. Neither am I, if I’m honest about the situation, and I always like to be honest. I am here now, and I want to make the best of this visit, because soon enough I will be going home and then on to Texas to see my mother, and I do not know when I will see my friends again.
Fun. It’s the most important word there is right now. That seems odd to say. I’ve never considered whether words ought to be ranked in terms of importance, although I know that etymologists like to track the frequency with which words are used. But frequency and import are not necessarily the same thing. Let’s just say that fun is a very important word for Donna, Victor, Kyle, and me right now. There is no need to give it any more gravity than that.
I have a breakfast of oatmeal, which is fast becoming one of my favorite foods now that Dr. Rex Helton has recommended it to me as I battle my type 2 diabetes. Donna sits with me and we talk. I tell her about my diagnosis, and she’s greatly interested in that, because she’s a nurse and has seen the effects of unchecked diabetes up close.
“Helton is absolutely right, Edward,” she says. “This is different than juvenile diabetes. You can beat this thing. You can shed the weight and get your sugars under control, and you can come off this medicine.”
“It makes me pee a lot.” I pop a hand over my mouth. “I’m sorry. It’s impolite to talk about peeing.”
I hear Kyle’s voice coming up from behind me. “Peeing is cool.”
He says it like those cartoon characters on the music television channel, and then he chuckles stupidly like those two guys do.
“OK, wise guy, come have some breakfast,” Donna says.
She slides a bowl toward him, and he sits down in the chair to my right. I get a better look at him in the morning light, and he gets a better look at me.
“Looks like your face is healing, dude,” he says.
I touch the skin around my nose.
“Really?”
“Yeah. Man, you really got your ass kicked.”
Donna snaps, “Don’t even start, young man.”
He looks up at her, then digs into his breakfast.
“Had you ever been beaten up before?”
“You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to, Edward,” Donna says.
I put down my spoon. I don’t mind answering.
“Beat up? No. I got picked on a lot. There were even boys who might have tried to beat me up, if they thought they could have gotten away with it. But, no, nobody ever did that before. I wasn’t ready for it.”
“Are you going to learn to fight so it doesn’t happen again?”
Kyle’s interest in this topic flummoxes me.
“I don’t want to fight,” I say.
“But what if someone wants to fight you?”
“I’ll walk away.”
“What if you can’t?”
“I can’t imagine that circumstance. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t happen. I just can’t imagine a situation where I wouldn’t have a chance to leave and extricate myself from what was happening. ‘Extricate’ is a good word, by the way. I love it.”
“Whatever. Maybe you don’t have much of an imagination.”
Kyle is a very perceptive young man.
“I don’t.”
“So maybe it will happen again.”
This conversation has become circular, but I am loath (I love the word “loath”) to end it because Kyle is actually talking to me. The problem is that I don’t know what to say to him that will keep the conversation alive without going over the same things we have already addressed. That will exhaust me and make me cranky.
Donna, however, does know what to say.
“How about we talk about something other than who is going to be beat up by whom and when?”
I love that Donna uses her pronouns properly.
Kyle does not seem interested in another topic. He goes back to eating his cereal, and we sit in silence.