Read Online All About Lulu by Jonathan Evison - Free Book Online

now?”
    “Uh, you mean, like she barely talks to me?”
    “What is it you want to say to her?”
    “I don’t know. I mean, I guess I’d like to know what happened, but I wouldn’t even ask her. I don’t want to have some big talk. I just want to talk like we used to talk.”
    But there was nothing I could do to win Lulu’s favor back. No song or dance would arouse her slightest curiosity. I invented whole systems of logic to help explain what happened to us. How can I explain my compulsion, except to say that it was the most natural thing in the world, as involuntary as an itch. I checked the mail diligently. Lulu received nothing. No phone calls, either. I followed her at school, lurking around corners, staking out her locker between periods. I watched her eat her lunch from across the cafeteria—that is, when I wasn’t eating lunch with Harry Pitts.
    One day I tailed Lulu from Current Events to Lit, then from the AV room to the portable behind the gym, where fi fth period she T.A.’ed for Mrs. Melendez in Special Ed. I pressed my face to the narrow rectangular window and watched Lulu drift around the room in her baggy sweatshirt, dispensing charcoal pencils, passing the math ball around the circle. While I was watching, Anna Burke, the big fat retarded girl who always smelled like papier-mâché and wore one of those furry-collared coats no matter what kind of weather it was, stood up from her seat and started blubbering. There was milk all over her face, and dried boogers all around her nose, and she was really going nuts about something.
    Mrs. Melendez went over and tried to calm her down, but that only made her worse. She began stomping her feet and plugging her ears. She was screaming so loud that I could hear her clearly through the walls of the portable.
    “Nooooo,” she was yelling. “Nooooo.” She was saying other stuff, but I couldn’t decipher it through all the snot and the screaming and the excitement.
    Then, for a second while Anna Burke was freaking out, I thought Lulu saw me at the window, because she walked right toward me, until her face was only four or fi ve feet from my own. But all she did was turn off the light, and the room went gray, and Anna Burke calmed down immediately. Lulu went over and began stroking her big broad jacketed shoulders, and talking to her softly, so that I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but whatever it was, it had a soothing effect on Anna Burke. Within fi fteen seconds she was smiling. Lulu pulled An-na’s handkerchief out of her coat pocket, and I remember thinking it was probably crusty. And she wiped the boogers and the milk from around Anna’s face, and she kept talking softly to her the whole time.
    Finally, Lulu gently coaxed Anna to sit back down, and then pulled a chair up next to her. Together they looked at Anna’s workbook.
    I stood there for ten minutes fogging up the window, wishing I were retarded, and I sensed that the terrible day had fi nally arrived when Lulu could no longer feel my eyes upon her.
    In the mad jumble of the corridor between classes, Lulu was always alone. She convened with no one at her locker. She ate her lunch alone. She walked to the bus alone. And I knew she was alone in her room. Clearly, it wasn’t somebody else that stood between us.
    The conclusion was inescapable: It was me. She had outgrown me and all of my fl aws—my cowardice, my clinginess, my general lack of grace. Somehow she had managed to see past my veneer, straight through to my black little heart. The bigger world of Vermont had revealed something to Lulu. She had crossed some threshold and left childish things behind. And while she was away, she saw me for what I truly was: a toad.
    “Have you ever considered that it’s not you?” Harry Pitts wanted to know.
    “Yeah, I have.”
    “And?”
    “And I don’t know. What else am I supposed to think?”
    “Well, have you ever thought that this girl is going through some uncomfortable changes of her