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  At first, Gloria-In-Excelsis was shocked. And Joseph was shocked. And the other girls nearby at their lockers checking their cell phones, they were shocked too. And at least one boy grimaced. (Yes, I know a grimace when I see one.)

  I was still holding G’s glasses in my hand. My face was still close to Gloria’s and I could feel her warm breath. I could see from her face that she had been crying—not much, but a small tear drop had, before the kiss, made its tiny stream down her face. And this close, frozen in time, it seemed, I realized she was even prettier than I had imagined. She was a beauty in hiding.

  No, I did not kiss her a second time. At that point I didn’t quite believe I had kissed her at all. But I had. The shock wave was wearing off. I didn’t say anything. She didn’t say anything. Probably because we had both lost the capacity for speech. The word “abstinence” appeared in my brain again. But I had already achieved the double negative. I had abstained from not kissing her.

  She took a breath. I realized that both of us had stopped breathing. I took a breath.

  And then she smiled.

  She smiled and she hugged me. Me. A hug.

  The bell rang, announcing that the next class was starting. Action in the hallway up to that point had frozen like one of those freeze-frame scenes in a movie. Now people came back to life and started moving. I heard one guy, walking by, say, “What the hell was that?” A girl said, “Man, this school is getting so weird.”

  Gloria did not appear self-conscious. She took her arms from around me and smiled some more. I had not seen her smile like this for a long time. Her eyes looked kind of soft and out of focus but that could have been because I was still holding her glasses.

  A bit of the old me, Joseph, had re-established control of my brain. “I’m sorry,” I said. Dumb thing to say for sure, but it came out.

  “Don’t be,” she said. And then she kissed me.

  And we were both late for class. Gloria’s French teacher, Ms. Lalonde, was holding the door open to her nearby classroom. She was watching us and cleared her throat rather loudly in a French teacher sort of way. Gloria closed her locker and then touched my hand as she retrieved her glasses. She began to walk away, still smiling.

  I wandered, stumbled really, off to my own class on the other side of the building. It took me a few minutes to remember what class I had next. Right. Math. Mr. Dexter announced as I walked in, “Joseph, you are late.”

  “Thank you,” I said and took a seat near the window.

  There is another theory about our world that suggests that for one person to be happy, someone must be equally unhappy somewhere else. It’s kind of like Einstein’s conservation of matter and energy thing. Only so much happiness to go around, so if it’s doled out in one place, it’s taken away somewhere else. If that is true, I apologize to the unknown person I made unhappy. But here at Northside Regional High, for a brief moment, I had taken away Gloria’s pain. And I felt good about it. In a random universe, I was beginning to discover, there were certain illogical actions that could have very positive results.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Henry and Celia.

  The kiss must have triggered something. Can kissing do that? Unleash memories? It made me think of Charlene, sure. She was the first girl I ever kissed. But it got me thinking about my Bio-Mom and Bio-Dad too. They had kissed a lot. It was kind of embarrassing, really. No twelve-year-old kid wants his parents smooching in public. By the front door, in the driveway, in the mall. They would have smooched in the movie theater like teenagers if they’d made it that night.

  When I got home from school, I unearthed the one photo album I have with pictures from back then. There’s a box, too, with random photos somewhere, but the album was something that Will and Beth helped me put together when I moved in. They thought it would help.

  I opened it and stared at a picture of my dad first. It was a photo of him before I had been born. He was in a rock band then. A heavy metal band called Jackhammer. “There were a lot of tool names going around for bands in those days,” I remember Henry saying. “The Drill, Wrench, Rip Saw, Chisel, that sort of thing.” My dad’s hair was long and hanging down in front of his face in the photo. He held his guitar, slung low in front of him. It was a pose. Jackhammer had recorded some music, “on our own dime,” as he put it. They played some clubs and toured—well, at least they had some gigs out of town.

  That’s how he met my mom. No kidding. Celia had just started teaching elementary school. Celia had that dark black hair and a really nice way of smiling. One of her friends had invited her out on a Friday to hear some “music.” Celia thought her friend meant a different kind of music. Something easy on the ears. She thought it would be folk music or maybe folk-rock. Instead, she found herself staring at a rude-looking and rude-talking heavy metal band playing loud, angry metal. “I hated it at first,” she had told me. “I mean, who would name a band Jackhammer? And why did they have to be so loud? But then the band took a break and he came over to the table.” The he was, of course, my future father.

  Henry reportedly sat down and just stared at my mother through the long straggly hair that hung down in front of his face. “He spooked me at first,” I remember Mom saying. “Just staring like that. My friend, Kathleen, got up to go to the bathroom. And I was left there alone with this freaky guy who said nothing, just stared.”

  So you can see that I came by my nerdy weirdness honestly. My father’s genes. I think I’m only now beginning to see how I am my father’s son.

  “Henry,” he had finally said, by way of belated introduction. He shot his hand out to shake. But he did it so fast and so aggressively that my mom jumped.

  “Celia,” she finally said and shook his hand. Henry continued to stare at her and later reported that her dark hair and large dark eyes reminded him of a seal. In a good way. He had always thought seals were very beautiful. Their faces, at least.

  They did not kiss that night, according to the legendary story. Instead, they engaged in awkward conversation that I imagine went something like this.

  “So, you’re in a band?” she said.

  “Yes, I am. And you?”

  “I teach in an elementary school.”

  “No, I mean really?” he would have said.

  “Really. I teach nine- and ten-year-olds.”

  “Wow. What do you teach them?”

  “How to spell. Arithmetic. Social skills.”

  “Social skills? They do that in school now?”

  “Yes. We’re big on conflict resolution.”

  Conflict resolution is a term Seal liked to use around the house. I always thought it should be applied to stopping wars, resolving hostile differences between nations, and that sort of thing. “It does,” she had explained to me. “But you have to teach people the skills when they are young. If you can resolve a conflict in the schoolyard, you can prevent a war.”

  So my mom was in charge of preventing World War Three. “There’s not a bully out there that I can’t learn to like,” I remember her saying. “People are inherently good. Sometimes you just have to bring it out of them.” My mom said stuff like that all the time. I feel bad that I sometimes laughed at her. I thought I knew more about bullies than she did. I’d seen a few rotten ones in my twelve years and it was hard to see the “good” in them. I rolled my eyes at her but my dad would furtively shake his head and make a secretive wave of his hand, coaching me to be nice to my mother. Later he’d say, “Be nice to your mother.”

  On that fateful night when my parents met, the conversation was awkward, for sure. The band’s break was almost over and my dad gave it his best shot. “I’m gonna play a love song I wrote for you. I didn’t know I wrote it for you. I didn’t have anybody to play it for, but now I want to play it for you.”

  My mom blushed, I am sure, as only an elementary teacher can blush.

  Later she would report to me, “It didn’t sound like any love song I’d ever heard. It was loud and raunchy and I couldn’t understand
any of the words. But I was smitten.”

  Smitten. That was the word she used. “Inspired or inflamed with love,” so says my trustworthy OED.

  They were as different as two people could be. Dad wanted to be the next Ozzie Osborne. Mom wanted to teach little children to be good citizens. But they were both smitten. If they had been more cautious, I would not have come into this world. Like many before me, I was an accident. I’m sure there is a more complete story but it would have been revealed to me later in life, not before twelve. All I know is that I was not intended.

  So even unmarried elementary school teachers sometimes have sex with long straggly-haired metal guitarists in bands named after tools. It’s a strange world indeed. And I am the product of that world and of that most human but most unlikely union of a man and a woman.

  When news reached Henry that Seal was “with child,” Henry cried. But he cried in a good way. “I was so happy,” he said, “but I was afraid she would push me away. I was pretty insecure. Most lead singers in metal bands were insecure in those days. And assholes. Most of us were assholes. We just didn’t know it.”

  My father used that kind of language around me even when I was young. I remember that now.

  The other photo right beside my hairy dad was Mom at around the same time. Funny, there were no photos here of the two of them together—no photos of them before my father cut his hair, at least. Lots of them together after she scissored his locks. But my mom, the Seal, was young in the solo picture and gorgeous. I would have fallen in love with her if I had been my father or any other member of Jackhammer. But I guess that’s a kind of weird thing for me to say.

  The other guys in the band truly wanted to go on the road. There was this great dream to “hit the Coast.” The Coast was where it was happening, where Jackhammer might have broken through the concrete wall that was keeping them from stardom. “But I couldn’t leave Seal,” my dad said in one of his many tellings of the tale. “I couldn’t leave you.”

  So he split from the band, with a lot of hard feelings and very little conflict resolution. And he asked Seal to cut his hair. Celia said he didn’t have to, but he thought he had to do it “to fit into the daytime world,” as he called it. And he got a job at a hardware store. They moved into an apartment that smelled like cat pee and had the world’s loudest refrigerator. As I gathered together my energy to come into this world, my mom took a leave from work, my dad worked overtime, and then there were three.

  Not long after Joey-1 appeared on the scene, they got married.

  And the rest, as they say, is history. I sucked milk, burped, vomited, dirtied a lot of diapers, and eventually discovered there was a world out there to be explored. My dad was offered a job representing a power tool company. He became a salesman of sorts but didn’t have to travel very far from home and never had to stay away overnight. He made better money than at the hardware store so they could move into a nicer apartment, without cat pee smell and with a quiet refrigerator.

  And he dreamed of one day going back to playing music. I still have his old dented and dinged Fender Strat here in my closet. He used to play it sometimes on Saturdays after we had moved again, this time into the house. He started teaching me to play the guitar when I was nine, but I was a slow learner and my fingers were kind of small. “If I can play the guitar, then you can play the guitar,” he said, even as I struggled to form a basic G chord. Pretty soon I had the G and I could play the opening part to “Smoke on the Water” by an old band called Deep Purple.

  My mom didn’t go back to teaching until I was six. But when she did, she picked right back up on the conflict resolution thing and taught her kids how to use “I messages”— ways of speaking in a disagreement where there is no blame placed on the other person. “I understand you are feeling angry, Joey, but you still can’t eat all that candy.” That sort of thing. “You messages” were out. “I messages” were in.

  It should have been a happily-ever-after story, don’t you think? Metalhead meets his Madonna. (Not the Madonna.)

  So you must be wondering what it is like to suddenly reminisce like this, reflect on my old life, the one that’s shattered and gone. Well, it seems as if none of it could be real. So I close the album and put it away. It’s gonna take a lifetime to fit those pieces back into my life. There were no grandparents to take me in. All of them were dead. And there were no kindly aunts and uncles. There were social workers and a couple of foster homes. A damn good lawyer and then Will and Beth stepped up to the plate. No kids of their own and willing to adopt a traumatized twelve-year-old who, according to the shrinks, might act out with his hurt or anger in any number of bizarre or violent ways.

  But they took me anyway. And I could not figure out who or what I should get angry at. Except me, of course. Textbook case. I blamed me for the death of the rock star and the teacher-goddess.

  But I think I eased up on the blame when I came to the brilliant conclusion that the world did not make any sense. None at all. And that helped a little. It eased the burden of living.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The word “tragedy” has its roots in ancient Greek apparently, where it originally meant “a male goat.” That doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense today, but then, what does make sense? My old OED (bought by my first mother years ago at a library book sale, by the way) tells me that a tragedy is “a play or other literary work of a serious or sorrowful character with a fatal or disastrous conclusion.” Maybe because goats were sacrificed to the gods in ancient Greece—at least, that’s what I’m thinking—but it could be something else.

  “Fatal” is another of one those intriguing words. Traditionally meaning “doomed” or “decreed by fate: inevitable, necessary.” Today, we use it rather loosely, of course, but it always implies a bad thing. The Romans had three goddesses of human fate. They were in charge of making up the rules of what happens to whom and when. Their names were Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. Three females who said: good stuff for this kid, rotten luck for buddy.

  It was my first mother who got me interested in words. Words lead to ideas and sometimes ideas prompt me to stop thinking about my own grief. I wish sometimes I could blame Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos for what they did, but I don’t think they exist. I don’t believe in Roman or Greek gods. Those gods did some pretty freaky stuff and because they were gods, they got away with a lot of it. So what do you suppose happened to those gods, once people stopped believing in them?

  Now, about God, the God with the capital G, please don’t ask me if I believe in him. Because I would simply be silent. I would not give you an answer.

  Well, sorry I had to cut that last session short. I grew weary of thinking about goddesses, fate, fatalities, fatalism, or any of it. I wanted my mind to settle down and go blank. So I shut off the recorder and I stared out the window. I stared at a tree in the yard. There was a squirrel in that tree and I wished my fate had been to be that squirrel, not Joseph, sitting in his bedroom alone.

  What happened to me then was this. I felt a heaviness sneaking up from the back of my brain. The heaviness made me panic at first, but then a dark, warm, empty feeling flooded into me.

  I went to sleep after that and woke up still feeling heavy. Drugged even. I had been dreaming—something from back before the accident. It was fuzzy but one thing was clear. For the first time in a really long while—four years maybe— I wanted to go back to my old hometown. I wanted to go back to Riverside, the town I’d lived in up until I was twelve years old.

  But I didn’t have the courage to do it on my own.

  So I called Gloria. Every now and then, my mind slipped back to the memory of the two of us kissing and I had made many mental notes that we should do more of that soon.

  “Hello?” she said. She sounded strangely lifeless.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “I can’t seem to snap out of it. I just feel like sleeping.”

  “I think I know a little bit about how you feel. Something happened to m
e today. I don’t know what it was. But it freaked me out.” I explained to her my weird little blip.

  “Yeah, I feel the heaviness, too. But it doesn’t seem to go away.”

  “But will you help me? I can’t do this alone.”

  “Help you do what?”

  “Reconnect. I’ve shut out everything of the past for so long that none of it seems real. I can’t remember a lot of things.

  But now I need to know.”

  “I don’t know if I can do anything.”

  “Please?” I begged.

  She sighed. “Sure. Where do we start?”

  “Would you help me locate Charlene?”

  “Your girlfriend from when you were twelve?” She sounded a little miffed.

  “Is that too weird?”

  “Yes,” she said emphatically.

  “For some reason, I need to start with her.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I guess because she was my first girlfriend,” I said. And I almost said, “and my last.” But I didn’t. Like I said, Gloria wasn’t exactly my girlfriend. She was my friend.

  Gloria let out another sigh. “What was her last name?”

  “Thomas. Charlene Thomas.”

  “And you really want me to find her.”

  “Charlene Thomas, now sixteen, I presume, lives in Riverside, goes to Riverside High, I would guess.”

  “And you want me to contact her and tell her you’d like to meet her?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a pause and then Gloria said, “I’ll see what I can do.” And then hung up.

  I sat by the window again, staring out at the tree, the big oak tree that the birds liked—sparrows and grackles and robins and catbirds. And blue jays. In my next life, if there was a next life, I wanted to come back as a blue jay. When things got bad, you could just fly away. And blue jays had a really cool look and attitude.