Then, on a whim, I reached into my backpack, pulled out a notebook and pen, and began writing something.
“What are you doing?”
“You’ll see.”
When I was done, I tore the page out of the notebook, held it up, and read it aloud. “‘I hereby give one month of my life to Gunnar Ümlaut. Signed, Anthony Bonano.’” I handed it to him. “There. Now you’ve got borrowed time. Seven months instead of six months—so you don’t gotta start digging your own grave for a while.”
Gunnar took it from me, looked it over, and said, “This doesn’t mean anything.”
I expected him to launch into some Shakespearean speech about the woes of mortality, but instead he showed me the paper, pointing to my signature, and said, “It’s not signed by a witness. A legal document must be signed by a witness.”
I waited for him to start laughing, but he didn’t.
“A witness?”
“Yes. It should also be typed, and then signed in blue ink. My father’s a lawyer, so I know about these things.”
I still couldn’t tell whether or not he was kidding. Usually I can read people—but Gunnar, being Swedish and all, is as hard to figure out as IKEA assembly instructions; even if I think I’m reading him right, it’s guaranteed I’ve done something wrong and I’ll have to start over.
Since his expression stayed serious, I thought of something to say that sounded seriously legal. “I’ll take it under advisement.”
He grinned and slapped me hard on the back. “Excellent. So let’s have dinner and watch The Grapes of Wrath.”
Five places were set for dinner—including one for Mr. Ümlaut, who was presumably working late, but would be home “eventually.” Mrs. Ümlaut made hamburgers, although I was expecting something more Scandinavian. I knew about Scandinavian food on account of this Norwegian smorgasbord place my family once accidentally ate at, because it was called DØNNY’S and my parents thought the ø was an e. Anyway, there was a lot of food at the buffet, including like fourteen thousand kinds of herring—which I wouldn’t touch, but it was satisfying to know there were so many different things I could refuse to eat. I was oddly disappointed that not a single form of herring was on the Ümlauts’ menu.
Sitting at the Ümlauts’ dinner table that night was not the nerve-racking ordeal I had thought it would be. No one talked about Gunnar’s illness, and I didn’t say anything too terribly stupid. I talked about the proper placing of silverware, and the cultural reasons for it—something my father made sure to teach me, since I had to put out place settings at the restaurant. It made me look sophisticated, and balanced out anything subhuman I might have done at the table. I even demonstrated my water-pouring skill, pouring from high above the table, and not spilling a drop. It made Kjersten laugh—and I was pretty certain she was laughing with me instead of at me—although by the time I got home, I wasn’t so sure.
Mr. Ümlaut didn’t make it in time for dinner. Considering how much my own father worked lately, I didn’t think much of it.
Dad came home early from work that night with a massive headache. Nine-thirty—that’s early by restaurant standards. He sat at the dining table with a laptop, crunching numbers, all of which were coming up red.
“You could change your preferences in the program,” I suggested. “You could make all those negative numbers from the restaurant come up green, or at least blue.”
He chuckled at that. “You think we could program my laptop to charm the bank so we don’t have to pay our mortgage?”
“You’d need a sexier laptop,” I told him.
“Story of my life,” he answered.
I thought about talking to him about Gunnar, but his worries tonight outweighed mine. “Don’t work too hard,” I told him—which is what he always said to me. Of course he usually said it when I was lying on the sofa like a slowly rotting vegetable.
Before I went to bed that night, I took a moment to think about the various weirdnesses that had gone on in Gunnar’s backyard that afternoon—particularly the way he acted when I gave him that silly piece of paper. I had written it just to give him a laugh, and maybe get him to shift gears away from dying and stuff. Had he actually taken me seriously?
I opened a blank document on my computer, and typed out a single sentence. Then I pulled up the thesaurus, changed a few key words, found a really official-looking font, put the whole thing in a hairline box, and printed it out:
I, Anthony Paul Bonano, being of sound mind and body, do hereby bequeath one month of my natural life to Gunnar Ümlaut.
Signature
Signature of Witness
I have to confess, I almost didn’t sign it. I almost crumpled the thing and tossed it into the trash, because it was giving me the creeps. I’m not a particularly superstitious guy . . . but I do have moments. We all do. Like, when you’re walking on the street, and you start thinking about that old step-on-a-crack rhyme. Don’t you—at least for a few steps—avoid the cracks? It’s not like you really think you’re gonna break your mother’s back, right? But you avoid the cracks anyway. And when somebody sneezes, and you say “God bless you,” you’re not saying it to chase away evil spirits—which is why people used to say it in the old days—but you don’t feel right if you don’t say it.
So here I am, looking at this very legal-looking piece of paper, and wondering what it means to sign away one month of my life. And then I think, if this was an actual contract—if it was true and somewhere in the Great Beyond a tally of days was being kept—would I still do it, and give Gunnar an extra month?
Sure I would.
I knew that without even having to think about it.
So I bit back the creepy step-on-a-crack feeling, got a blue pen, and signed my name. Then, during my first class the next morning, I got Ira to sign as witness.
And that’s when things began to get weird.
4 Photo Ops, Flulike Symptoms, and Trident Exchange in the Hallway of Life
There are very few things I’ve done in my life that I would consider truly inspired. Like the time I e-mailed everyone at school to tell Howie his pants were on backward. After dozens of people pulled him aside to tell him, he finally gave in to peer pressure, went into the bathroom, and turned his pants around, so they really were on backward.
That was inspired.
Giving Gunnar a month of my life—that was inspired, too. The problem with inspiration, though, is that it’s kind of like the flu—once one person gets it, it spreads and spreads until pretty soon everyone’s all congested and hawking up big wads of inspiration. It happens whether you want it to or not, and there’s no vaccination.
I tracked Gunnar down in the hallway between third and fourth periods that day, and presented him with his extra month, officially signed and witnessed.
He read it over, and looked at me with the kind of gaze you don’t want a guy giving you in a public hallway.
“Antsy,” Gunnar said, “there are no words to express how this makes me feel.”
Which was good, because words might have made me awkwardly emotional, and that would attract Dewey Lopez, the school photographer—who was famous for exposing emotions whenever possible. Such as the time he caught star football jock Woody Wilson bawling his eyes out in the locker room after losing the first game that season. In reality, Woody was crying because had just punched his locker and broken three knuckles, but nobody remembers that part—they just remember the picture—so he got stuck with the nickname “Wailing Woody,” which will probably stick to him like a kick-me sign for the rest of his life.
So here we are, Gunnar and me, standing there all ripe for a humiliating Kodak moment, and Gunnar finds the words I had wished he wouldn’t: “As Lewis once said to Clark, ‘He who would give his life for a friend is more valuable than the Louisiana Purchase, entire.’ ” And now all I can think about is what if he hugs me—and what if Dewey gets a picture, and I’m known as “Embraceable Antsy” for all eternity?
But instead Gunn
ar looks at the paper again and says, “Of course you didn’t specify which month you’re giving me.”
“Huh?”
“Well, each month has a different value, doesn’t it? September has thirty days, October has thirty-one, and let’s not even mention February!”
I have to admit, I was a little stunned by this, but that’s okay, since stunned is an emotion I can handle. It is, in fact, an acceptable state for me. I was willing to go with Gunnar’s practical approach—after all, he was the one who was dying, and I wasn’t going to question how he dealt with it. I did some quick counting on my fingers. “You got six months left, right? A seventh month would put you into May. So I’m giving you May.”
“Excellent!” Gunnar slaps me on the back. “My birthday’s in May!”
That’s when Mary Ellen McCaw descends out of nowhere, grabs the paper away from Gunnar, and says, “What’s this?”
Just so you know, Mary Ellen McCaw is the under-eighteen gossip queen of Brooklyn. She’s constantly sniffing out juicy dirt, and since her nose is roughly the size of Rhode Island, she’s better than a bloodhound when it comes to sniffing. I’m sure she knew about Gunnar’s illness; in fact, she was probably responsible for broadcasting the information across New York, and maybe parts of New Jersey.
“Give it back!” I demanded, but she just holds the thing out of reach, and reads it. Then she looks at me like I’ve just arrived from a previously unknown planet.
“You’re giving him a month of your life?”
“Yeah. So what?”
“Giving Gunnar a new lease on life? Antsy, that’s so sweet!”
This leaves me furtherly stunned, because no one has ever called me sweet—especially not Mary Ellen McCaw, who never had a nice word to say about anybody. I figure at first that maybe she means it as an insult, but the look on her face is sincere.
“What a nice thought!” she says.
I shrug. “It’s just a piece of paper.”
But who was I kidding? This thing was already much more than a stupid piece of paper. Mary Ellen turns from me to Gunnar, and bats her eyes at him. “Can I donate a month of my life, too?”
I look at her, wondering if she’s kidding, but clearly she’s not.
Gunnar, all flattered, gives her an aw-shucks look and says, “Sure, if you really want to.”
“Good, then it’s settled,” says Mary Ellen. “Antsy, you write up the contract, okay?”
I don’t say anything just yet, as I’m still set on stun.
“Remember to specify the month,” says Gunnar.
“And,” adds Mary Ellen, “make sure it says that the month comes from the end of my life, not the middle somewhere.”
“How could it come from the middle?” I dare to ask.
“I don’t know—temporary coma, maybe? The point is, even a symbolic gesture should be clear of loopholes, right?”
Who was I to argue with logic like that?
“So what’s it like at the Ümlauts’?”
Howie and Ira were all over me in the lunchroom that day, as if going over to the Ümlauts’ was like setting foot in a haunted house.
“Was there medical stuff everywhere?” Howie asked. “My uncle had to build a room addition just for his iron lung—the thing’s as big as a car.”
“I didn’t see anything like that,” I told them. “It’s not that kind of illness.”
“It must have been weird, though,” Ira said. I considered telling them about Gunnar’s do-it-yourself tombstone, but decided not to turn something so personal into gossip.
“It was fine,” I told them. “They’re just a normal family. The dad’s always off working. Their mom’s pretty cool, and Kjersten and Gunnar are just like any other brother and sister.”
“Kjersten . . .” Ira said, and he and Howie gave each other a knowing grin. “Did you get some quality time with her?”
“Actually, I did. We all had dinner together.” Ira and Howie were disappointed at how normal the whole thing was, considering. Still, it didn’t stop them from being envious that I actually got to eat a whole meal with Kjersten. I didn’t even have to exaggerate. The more I downplayed it, the more jealous they became.
There’s something to be said about being the envy of your friends. They made some of the standard rude jokes friends will make about beautiful girls out of their reach—the same ones I was tempted to make myself, but didn’t. Then the conversation came back to the subject of death, which is just as compelling and almost as distant as sex.
“Were they all religious and stuff?” Ira asked. “People always get that way when someone gets sick—remember Howie’s parents when they thought he had mad cow?”
“Don’t remind me,” says Howie.
I thought about it, but didn’t remember anything like that at the Ümlauts’. They didn’t say grace like we do at my house when someone remembers to. Ira was right—if Gunnar was my kid, I’d be saying grace all the time.
“His mom doesn’t talk about his illness at all,” I told them. “I guess that’s how they deal with it. It’s creepy, because there’s always, like, an elephant in the room.”
Then Howie looks at me with those drowning-penguin eyes, and I know where this is going.
“You’re joking right? Is that even legal?”
“Yeah,” I tell him, without missing a beat. “It’s housebroken, too, and can paint modern art with its trunk.”
“Okay,” Howie says, getting mad, “now you’re just making stuff up.”
I could keep this going for hours, but Ira chimes in. “It’s an expression, Howie. When something’s completely obvious but everyone’s ignoring it, you say ‘there’s an elephant in the room’—because, just like an elephant, it’s big and fat, and hard to ignore.”
Howie thinks about it and nods. “I get it,” he says. “Although that kind of weight gain could be glandular. Is it his mother?”
This time Ira doesn’t even throw him a life preserver.
That afternoon I had a second hallway encounter. It was one of those moments that gets burned into your brain like a cigarette on a leather couch. I’m convinced it left me with brain damage.
It was just before last period. I was scrambling to get my math book out of my locker before the tardy bell when I heard a familiar voice behind me saying my name for the third time in as many days.
“Antsy?”
I turned to see none other than Kjersten Ümlaut behind me. Her eyes were all moist and shiny, and the first thing that struck my brain was that Kjersten was even more beautiful in tears.
“I heard about what you did for Gunnar,” she said.
I’m figuring maybe she’s gonna slap me for it, so I say, “Yeah, sorry about that. It was a dumb idea.”
“I just wanted you to know how thoughtful it was.”
“Really?”
“Really. And I wanted to thank you.”
And that’s when it happened. She kissed me. I think maybe she meant to give me a little peck on the cheek, but I had just closed my locker and was turning, so the kiss landed a bull’s-eye on the mouth.
Okay—now you’d think this would be the stuff of dreams and fireworks and time-stopping, Matrix-like special effects, right? The thing is, that only happens when you’re expecting it and have time to set the moment up. But this was sudden. It was kind of like overcranking a cold car engine. It just grinds instead of starting. And so, what should have been the kiss from heaven was instead the lip-lock from hell.
See, I had just come back from phys ed, where we were running outside in the cold, so my nose was kinda stuffy and I was doing a whole lot of mouth breathing. In other words, my mouth is open like a fish when she comes at me.
The second it happens, a million volts go shooting through my head, and it’s too much to handle, so my brain decides to take a Hawaiian vacation—I can almost hear the jet engines as it takes off from LaGuardia—and now the only thing in my head is gratitude that I got my braces off last month, followed immediat
ely by horror, because now she’s getting nothing but retainer, and why did I pick today of all days to have salami for lunch, and would the brownie I ate afterward provide enough cover, and where’s that mint flavor coming from?
Then in a second I’m hearing bells, and I think it’s some sort of mental shell shock, until I realize it’s the tardy bell, which means I’ll get detention, but none of that matters, because there’s Dewey Lopez with his camera, preserving the moment for eternity and saying, “Thanks, guys, that one’s a keeper!” and he’s gone, maybe to look for my brain on that beach in Maui.
Kjersten finally pulls away, and I say—I swear I actually say this: “Do you want your gum back, or should I keep it?”
She’s a little red in the face, or maybe it’s green, because I think my brain-burn left me temporarily color-blind.
“Sorry,” she says, and I’m thinking it’s me who should be saying sorry, but I’m still figuring out what the hell I should do with the gum, and then she says, “Well, I just wanted to thank you. It’s just what Gunnar needs.”
“Thanks for thanking,” I say. “Thank me anytime!” And then she’s gone faster than Dewey Lopez.
As for me, I went off to sit in a math class that I have absolutely no memory of.
My experience with girls is limited, and usually ends in pain. The one exception is Lexie Crawley. The crash site of that relationship eventually grew flowers, instead of poison ivy and fly-traps. In other words, after breaking up, Lexie and I became friends—and it’s not like the friendship I’ve got with Howie and Ira. See, Howie and Ira, they’re more like family. You can’t get rid of them, so you don’t even try, and learn to live with them. It’s okay having friends like that, because no matter what direction your life takes, you’ll always have the Howies and Iras of the world to raise your self-esteem, because they make you look good by comparison.