The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen (19 page)

Troy was at his locker with his friends Mike and Josh. “Hey, Fartley, love the new glasses.” They all cracked up. Troy pulled earbuds out of his ears and carefully wrapped them around a new iPod Touch.

A picture flashed through my mind: Troy, standing at his locker, flipping through a textbook, while Farley told me about the money he was going to bring to school the next day.

“You got an iPod Touch,” I said.

“Duh.”

“Where’d you get the money?”

Troy shared a look with Mike and Josh. “I came into a
small inheritance,” he said, smirking. He slid the iPod into his jeans pocket, grabbed a binder from his locker, and closed the door. “
Hasta la vista
, suckers.”

Farley’s eyes locked with mine.

Troy started to walk away.

I felt the furies bubble up inside me. “Can I see it for a sec?” I heard myself saying. “I’m thinking of getting one myself.”

Troy considered my request. “You can look,” he said, pulling it out of his back pocket, “but don’t touch. I don’t want your germs on it.” He held it out in the palm of his hand.

I moved in for a closer look. Then I grabbed it and ran like hell.

Next thing I remember, I woke up in hospital.

5:00 p.m.

Dad filled in a couple of blanks when he came by after work. “I got a call at the construction site just after 9:00 a.m. It was your principal. He said you’d fallen and hit your head, and that you’d been taken to the hospital in an ambulance. I didn’t even tell my boss where I was going. I just tore out of there and drove to the hospital.

“The doctor told me you’d suffered a concussion and they were keeping you under observation because they
wanted to make sure there was no bleeding on the brain.”

My dad had to stop for a moment to compose himself. “Bleeding” and “brain” were two words he’d heard a lot after Jesse did what he did.

“Then the principal showed up, and all he could tell me was that you’d been in a fight and hit your head. He still didn’t know all the details, but he said a friend of yours got help immediately and the ambulance was there very fast. I called your mom, and she caught the first flight. You had us terrified there for a while, Henry.”

Now both my mom and my dad are sitting beside my bed. Mom’s sleeping, and her head is resting against Dad’s shoulder. He’s holding her hand.

And even though I may have a brain injury, I haven’t felt this content in a really long time.

6:30 p.m.

Mystery solved.

Farley came by after school and filled in the rest of the blanks. His lip was almost back to normal. He was wearing his regular glasses again.

“Greetings, Mrs. Larsen,” he said when he met my mom. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.” Then he bowed low and kissed her hand. Mom raised an eyebrow at me, but she was smiling. Since I had company, she decided to go home and have a shower, which was probably a good thing because her hair was starting to look greasy.

Farley was like a hummingbird, darting around the room, checking everything out. He pressed the buttons on my bed to make it move up and down. Then he pressed the button that called the nurses’ station.

“Oh. Sorry. I was just seeing if it worked,” he said to Sandra when she entered.

“Henry, keep an eye on your friend,” Sandra said, winking at me.

She’s my favorite.

“There’s so much to tell you!” Farley exclaimed as he finally sat down in the chair next to my bed. “Troy’s been expelled!”

“What??”

“Well, not expelled, schools can’t really do that anymore,
but he was ‘strongly encouraged’ to change schools. It turns out they’ve had a file on him all along. A
big
file, going all the way back to when he put that peanut in Ambrose’s sandwich.”

That made me wonder if Port Salish Secondary had had a file on Scott all along. Maybe Jesse should have given them more credit.

“Wait – back up. What happened? The last thing I remember is grabbing his iPod.”

Here’s what Farley told me:

Apparently I ran into the boys’ washroom. Troy was so startled, it took him a moment to chase after me. By the time he, Mike, Josh, and Farley had burst into the washroom, I was already standing in one of the stalls.

And I’d already thrown Troy’s iPod Touch into the toilet. And I’d already started flushing repeatedly.

Apparently I also started talking Robot. “You. Are a Dick,” I said to Troy. “A Jerk. A Creep. A Waste. Of Space.”

Farley says Troy screamed a whole pile of words I can’t repeat, then he ordered me to get his iPod out of the toilet.

So I did. I scooped it out of the toilet bowl, but instead of handing it back to him, I threw it onto the hard tile floor and started stomping on it.

That’s when Troy began punching me. Farley says I got in a couple of not-bad swings myself. “But the best part was
when you tried to do the Bell Clap.” The Bell Clap is one of the Great Dane’s favorite moves, and it involves slapping both ears of your opponent really hard with the palms of your hands to distort their balance.

I groaned.

“Yeah, it didn’t do much,” Farley admitted. “It only made him angrier. But it
looked
cool.”

Apparently it was after I attempted the Bell Clap that Troy punched me so hard, I fell back and hit my head on the toilet seat and blacked out.

“That was scary,” Farley said. “You just crumpled. You lay there on the bathroom floor, not moving. Troy freaked. He and Mike and Josh just cleared out. I was shouting at you to wake up, and then Ambrose came into the bathroom, and I told him to go get the principal, and I pulled out my cell phone and called 911.”

“Thanks, Farley. You pretty much saved my life.”

“I pretty much did!” he gloated.

He left his chair and perched on the edge of my bed. “While we were waiting for the ambulance,” he said, “you came to for a while. But you were totally disoriented. You kept talking about someone named Jesse.” Farley looked at me with his magnified eyes. “Who’s Jesse?”

I took a deep breath. Then I did what was either the bravest thing I’ve ever done or the stupidest.

“He’s my brother,” I said.

And then I told Farley the whole horrible truth.

When I was done, Farley was really quiet. His glasses had fogged up. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

“I’ll understand if you don’t want to hang around me anymore,” I said.

He took off his glasses and wiped the lenses on his pants. “Why would I not want to hang around you?”

I shrugged. “It freaks people out. Like they think our whole family has cooties or something.”

Farley put his glasses back on. “Henry, what you did for me the other day – you were like the Great Dane, taking on Vlad the Impaler. You defended me against the ultimate heel.”

He took his handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. “You’re my best friend in the whole world.”

I looked at him, sitting on my bed. I took in his magnified eyes, his pocket protector, his pants that were buckled right under his nipples.

And I said, “You’re my best friend, too.”

Then my eyes got a bit moist, and Farley opened his arms, and I realized he was coming in for a hug. It was turning into way too much of a Hallmark Moment. Luckily an aide brought in my supper tray just before he could swoop in, and he got distracted. “
Ooh
, is that Salisbury
steak? Are you going to eat it?” he asked me.

It looked disgusting – a piece of dry meat with congealed gravy on top. “No,” I said. “Dad’s bringing me an individual pizza from Panago.”

“May I?”

I laughed. “Go for it.”

Farley dug right in. He ate every last bite. I sat propped up in my bed and watched him, amazed that I had ever dreamed of getting an upgrade, when I’d had the best model all along.

I wish I could say that things went as well with Alberta as they did with Farley, but they didn’t.

She finally came by this morning, carrying a plastic container full of muffins. “I made them myself,” she said as she sat in the chair beside my bed. “Blueberry.”

I took one out and ate it. It was quite good, and I only had to pull one unidentifiable crunchy thing out of my mouth.

“Thanks,” I said when I was done. “Delicious.”

She just looked down at her purple Doc Martens, and it dawned on me that she was embarrassed to let me see her eyes.

“I’m really sorry for what I said to you that day, Alberta –”

“You should be,” she interrupted. “It was cruel.”

“I know. I guess I was trying to be cruel. I was scared.”

“Scared of
what?
”

“That you’d find out the truth.”

“About what? About that girl?”

I nodded. “Yes, sort of. About her, and her brother. And my brother.”

“The one who died of cancer?”

I sighed. After being silent on the subject for so long, here I was, having to tell the story two days in a row. “About that,” I began.

When I was done, Alberta was completely silent. Tears were rolling down her face. I didn’t mean to make her cry, but let’s face it: It’s a sad story.

She stood up and leaned over me. I really thought she was going to kiss me, and I was worried about my breath because I hadn’t brushed my teeth, and I knew I must have horrible morning stinks.

But she didn’t kiss me.

She punched me in the stomach.

“You lied to me,” she said.

Then she punched me again, one for the road before she stormed out.

The doctors say I can go home today. I’m not allowed to go back to school yet; they want me to rest at home for at least a week and come back in for a checkup. Then they’ll decide if I’m ready. This is fine by me.

I told Sandra she could have the balloons. She gave me a hug and told me to stay out of trouble. I said I’d try my best.

1:00 p.m.

I’m in my room now, resting.

I thought it would feel good, coming back to the apartment with both my parents. But to be honest, it’s weird.

First we had to walk past new handwritten signs in the foyer. The first one read “
WE
should not have to get rid of
your
junk mail!! Please deal with it yourself!!
” The second note, stuck underneath the first one, read “
GET A LIFE!!!!!
”

Then, when we entered the apartment, I saw the photos. Mom had obviously been down in the storage locker, because there were at least ten framed pictures of Jesse, or Jesse and me, or Jesse, me, Mom and Dad, hanging on the living-room walls.

And Jesse was there, too.

The shoebox was sitting on the mantelpiece above the gas fireplace. My mom must’ve seen me staring at it because she said, “I can’t believe your father’s had him under his bed all this time.”

“At least I was with him,” my dad retorted, and my stomach lurched because I knew right then and there that they’d been fighting a lot.

Then my dad picked up a bubble envelope from the hall table and handed it to me. “This arrived for you when you were gone.”

I knew the handwriting immediately.

Jodie. Her name was written in the left-hand corner, with an address I didn’t recognize.

My knees suddenly didn’t want to support me. I almost fell over right there in the hall.

“Do you want us to read it first?” my mom asked. They both looked worried.

I shook my head. But I didn’t open it.

I still haven’t opened it. It’s sitting on my bedside table.

After IT happened, a lot of my friends made it clear they were no longer my friends. It happened to my parents, too. I had to shut down my hotmail account and my Facebook page, thanks to a few death threats.

Then there was the night someone started a fire in our garage.

So it’s not surprising that I’m afraid to open a letter from the sister of the boy Jesse killed, even if she was once my best friend in the whole wide world.

2:30 p.m.

I can’t stand it anymore. I’m opening it.

April 4

Dear Henry,

I’ve tried e-mailing you a couple of times, but they always bounce back. I was starting to think I would never find you again. So when I saw you at the Provincials, it was so weird. It was like I was seeing a ghost. When you vanished into thin air, I thought maybe I HAD seen a ghost. But then I talked to some of the kids on your team, and I knew you were real.

You saw me, too, didn’t you? And you didn’t want to talk to me. Maybe you haven’t even told your friends what happened. I wouldn’t blame you. I saw how people treated you and your family afterward. I rode past your house the day after your garage was lit on fire. Not because I was gawking, but because I thought I might see you.

Everything is so horrible, Henry. It’s like a nightmare, except I never wake up. And nobody gets it; nobody really understands, not even my grief counselor. And my parents are so messed up. My dad has a lot of hate. He doesn’t know I’m writing to you; he’d be furious if he did. My sister, thankfully, is too young to get it. But I know that the one person who will totally GET IT is you. ’Cause you’re living through the same nightmare, am I right? Maybe even worse.

I have so many questions I would ask you if I could. Do you have more bad days than good? Are your parents as totally messed up as mine? Do you have nightmares? Do you sometimes hate your brother? I sometimes hate Scott, and then I feel so bad, I want to hurt myself.

I wish you still lived here, Henry. Even though I know you never could.

Well, anyway … I really don’t know what else to say. Please, please write back, but not to my house, okay? You could write to Carrie’s house – she won’t tell anyone. Her address is on the envelope.

Bye for now, Henry.

Jodie

PS – I really hope you write back.

PPS – I hope you like the gift.