I thought about the pyramids, how slaves had dragged those huge stones for miles so that the pharaohs would have amazing graves. But New Veronia would be better, because we’d get to occupy the pyramid that we built, and we’d be alive inside of it, a sort of alive I was really looking forward to figuring out.
“Let’s get going,” Jay said.
Me and Jay and Toshi jammed water bottles in our back pockets and set off through the woods to the Save-Right. You could tell that the squirrels and birds hadn’t been expecting us, because they ran up trees and screamed as soon as they heard our footsteps. For a second, I thought I saw a dead body curled on its side, but it turned out to be a log with a fine layer of moss growing over it. My heart was still pounding even after, as I rubbed the crumbly moss between my fingers, and I kicked the log to show myself how it didn’t matter.
“So Knees,” Jay said as we walked, “what’d your dad do when you showed him your broken arm?”
“It was awful. He looked at me like he wished I’d been an ass-posit.”
My dad sometimes looked at me the same way, the one that meant he wished he’d blown his load in my mom’s butt so that I didn’t exist.
Toshi squeezed his wrist, which was now freed from the cast for the day of work on New Veronia. “When he tried to look at it, I was all ouch-ouch-ouch so he didn’t touch it too much, and plus he’d been drinking beer, so he backed off. Then, when I told him your parents paid for the whole thing, he practically cried with joy.”
“Killer,” I said. “Now you don’t have to go to band camp?”
“He still tried to force me to go. He was so mad. He must really want the house to himself, but I told him they would probably give me another scholarship next year, plus my wrist hurt and it was impossible for me to participate and the conductor wouldn’t stand for it, so I’m not going. Instead he’ll just have to ignore me and take his girlfriend to a motel. I can’t practice the horn, though. I’m really going to be behind when we get back to school—I bet I’ll end up third chair.”
The summer was starting off well—I’d come up with the idea to keep Toshi with us and his bones intact, which made me see that I might be better than I’d thought at manipulating the world.
“Have you seen the girlfriend?” Jay asked. “She hot?”
“Usually he doesn’t like to bring them around. Maybe I’m too much a reminder for them that he’s divorced or something.”
Toshi was right about the shortcut through the woods, and we made it to the Save- Right in a bit over half an hour. Around back, stacked next to the dumpsters, were a few five-foot-high piles of pallets.
“Jackpot!” Jay shadow-boxed the air.
We each took one, hooking an arm through the slats and resting it on a shoulder, and started back towards the line of trees. The sun was higher now and sweat trickled down my spine. The bottom of my pallet kept sticking against roots and bushes, and my shoulder ached with the weight of the thing, though it had not seemed heavy at first. All this to say: I was relieved when Toshi dropped his pallet, maybe three-quarters of a mile in, and said he couldn’t go any further.
“Don’t be a pussy,” Jay said, but he stopped and dropped his pallet, too. “We’re doing fine. What’s with you?”
“Maybe because I didn’t eat breakfast, and plus it gave me splinters,” Toshi said, which made Jay roll his eyes and say that Tosh needed to nut up.
“Yeah,” I said, “nut up.” Free of my pallet, I stretched my arms until the shoulder joint popped and I could feel my belly button gaping.
“Or maybe because it’s hot,” Toshi said. “Heat stroke is a leading cause of sudden death during exercise.”
“But we have to get back, right?” I said. “Because Toshi can’t do it on his own, I’ll leave my pallet propped right here, and I’ll help him carry his back to New Veronia, okay? And then we can come and get my pallet on the next trip.”
“This is going to take fucking forever,” Jay said. He hefted his pallet and began striding ahead. The side of his leg, the part that showed beneath his shorts, had three red scratches from the rough edge of the wood.
I took up the front end of Toshi’s load and he took up the back. “Hold it level, won’t you?” I said loud enough for Jay to hear, and with more venom than I felt. I wasn’t the weak one, and I had to be sure that Jay understood that.
We trooped in silence back to the site of New Veronia. As we neared it, the brushing of my pants between my legs began to feel good, like a girl’s hand cupping my balls, Stella, the girl that I would bring back to our pyramid house, and then I had an erection and I hoped feverishly that Jay wouldn’t look back and see.
I’d calmed myself down by the time that we reached the huge tree that would act as the center post for our triplex. It was a beautiful old tree with marbles of sap stuck in crevices of the bark and one funny branch that crooked in the middle like an elbow. It had been there for ages, and its shade had kept much of the ground beneath it cleared of other plants.
“We’ll need maybe six pallets for the floor,” Jay said, “and two for each outside wall, so six more, and three more for the inside walls, that’s…”
We all thought for a minute, and then Toshi said, “Fifteen pallets.” He shook his head sadly. “Fifteen.”
“We can get that many here in a day,” Jay said. “Easy.” And he started off, back through the woods. “Bennet,” he said, not too loud—he knew I was right behind him. “I heard from Mark”—one of his soccer teammates—“that Stella ski poled these two guys.”
The leaves all angled rightwards in a sudden breeze, their sound a flock of something alive.
Jay made Os with both of his hands and moved them up and down beside either hip, and I understood what he meant. “Like she milked them,” he said.
The leaves settled, and in the calm quiet my own breathing was too audible, so I tried to pinch the air inside my nostrils. Maybe it would rain later. The sky looked clear, but the clouds could blow in and surprise you.
A few hours later, the splinters in my palms looked like evil, invasive centipedes, my foot ached from where Toshi had dropped a pallet onto it, and all my skin felt lost beneath a layer of grime. We had six pallets. I felt dead tired.
Jay returned, zipping up after peeing against a tree outside of New Veronia town limits.
“Let’s go,” he said, “come on. We need nine more.” He looked tired, too, with his mouth hanging lopsided and his eyelids swollen.
Though I wanted to help Jay, I knew that, if I didn’t say something, he would keep pushing until he collapsed from exhaustion. “Maybe we should break for today? I’m starved.” The packets of trail mix we’d brought had long ago been emptied, and maybe the lightheaded dullness behind my eyes was as much from hunger as it was fatigue.
“You,” Jay said. “You people.”
If I had thought that I could make it one more time back and forth from the Save-Right, if my shoulder hadn’t felt dislocated from bearing the weight of all those pallets and my head shaky-light from lack of nutrients, there’s no doubt that I would have kept going to make Jay happy. “We’ll start again tomorrow,” I said, my voice way too high. “First thing. Toshi is really beat. Right?”
“Maybe I’m getting a cold,” Toshi said, too tired to defend his strength.
“Leave, then.” Jay kicked at the ground and a spray of black dirt, smelling like mushrooms, rose up before him. “Go. You make me sick.”
There was no doing anything with him when he was in this mood, and so I whispered to Toshi, “You ready? Let’s split,” and we went.
Once Toshi and I were on our bikes, I said, “Don’t worry. He’ll go home, too, and get some rest. He just likes to act tough or whatever.”