The Spectacular Now

He looks at me over the tops of his glasses. It’s a tsk-tsk look only without the sound effects. “Let me show you how it’s done, Mr. Keely,” he says. “Watch closely.”

And I’m like, Errrrrrrrrg! I can’t believe this. My earlier vision of Aimee alone by the door is turning out to be real. I can just hear her saying to herself, “I should’ve known he wouldn’t come. That’s how everybody treats me.”

“And that’s how it’s done, Mr. Keely,” says Mr. Asterhole, finally. “Does that seem to make sense to you?”

“Yes, sir,” I say. “It sure does. It seems to make a lot of sense.”

By the time I finally get out of there, I’m fifteen minutes late and counting, so I break into a jog. Ms. Giraffe-neckowsky sticks her head out of her history classroom, but I’m too far gone to yell at. A couple of friends—or quasi friends, actually—call out, “What’s the rush, Sutter?” and “Yeah, is there a fire or a party?” But I don’t have time to trade jokes right now.

When I get to the cafeteria, I can’t believe my eyes. There’s Aimee standing by the door alone. She waited. She actually waited. This girl is steadfast. She has faith in the Sutterman.

I slow down to a saunter. “Hey, you’re here,” I say, catching my breath. “Sorry I’m late.”

“That’s all right,” she says, and I have to wonder how many times she’s said that to the people in her life who screwed her over somehow.

“No,” I say. “It’s not all right. But I couldn’t help it.”

Chapter 21

As we walk in to get our pizza, I explain the situation with Mr. Asterhole. It turns out she also had him for Algebra II, but that was about a millennium ago or something since she’s now in AP Calc.

“You probably thought algebra was a breeze,” I say.

And she’s like, “Kind of.” Her voice is so soft. If it were a food item, it’d be a marshmallow.

“Maybe I could get you to tutor me.”

“Okay,” she says, and she has this little near-smile on her face like she thinks something good might actually happen to her but she can’t quite trust it.

Of course, the cafeteria is not the popular hot spot for lunch—I mean, I never go there—so we don’t have any difficulty finding a table. In fact, it’s kind of weird, like an alternate universe where there’s all these students who I never knew existed.

You might think that Aimee and I wouldn’t have much to talk about, but hey, I can talk to anybody. I start off with a story just to relieve her of the load of trying to come up with something to say. It’s one of my favorites, the time Ricky and I took a float trip down the Tuskogee River last summer.

We weren’t exactly bona fide canoeing experts and paid more attention to cracking jokes than navigating, so the occasional rollover was unavoidable. Once, we both ended up in the river with a semi-raging current around us. The canoe started spiraling away downstream, but what did Ricky and I do? We both swam straight for the ice chest. Save the beer at all costs! That was our attitude. Luckily the canoe got hung up on the bank and everything turned out fine.

Aimee’s like, “You guys are crazy,” but you can tell she kind of wishes she could be a little crazy herself sometimes.

“That’s not the craziest part of it,” I say. “The craziest part was when we decided to jump off the bridge.”

“You jumped off a bridge?”

“Of course. And not some puny little bridge either. It was one of those big iron bridges with the framework that arches way up. I mean, it must be about a mile from the top of that framework down to the water. It’s so high you have to watch out for low-flying aircraft up there. Some other dudes were jumping off of it, so we thought, What the hell? Might as well give it a try. We’d had quite a few beers by this time.”

She’s staring at me wide-eyed and rapt as all twelve apostles rolled into one.

“So up we climbed.” I gaze toward the ceiling to hint at just how high we had to go. “But the thing is the farther you climb the more you start to wonder if this is such a good idea. Somehow it looks higher when you’re actually on the bridge compared to when you’re just standing around on the ground staring up. But what can you do? Once you’re on your way, there’s no crawling back down without looking like a complete pu**y.”

She nods her understanding, although I’m not so sure girls fully get the whole looking-like-a-pussy dilemma.

“So, anyway, I do the Spider-Man all the way to the very top and take a seat up there in the breeze. And let me tell you, the view’s stupendous as long as you don’t look straight down, which of course, I happen to do. But like I say—there’s no turning back. So I take a humongous breath”—I demonstrate—“and down I go.”

“Did you dive headfirst?”

“Are you kidding? I’m not that crazy. No, I went feet first. And you know what? On the way down I discovered that you have an amazing amount of time to think while you’re in the air. So, there I am, and this idea hits me—what if a canoe comes floating under the bridge? I might plummet straight down and break someone’s neck. You know, it’s like I could take it if I just killed me, but I’d never forgive myself if I killed someone else while I was at it.”

“That’d be awful,” she says.

I gaze back toward the ceiling. “There I am in midair, looking down between my toes, and it’s like the water’s rushing up toward me, and then—whooom! I hit the surface.” I clap my hands and she jerks back.