Liar, Liar

6. A GOOD LIE HAS HUMOR AND STYLE

JonPaul came home with me after school to hang out and watch movies. But not until he’d asked if anyone else would be around.

“No, just us. Why?”

“Your mom and Sarah are okay and your Auntie Buzz moves so fast I don’t think germs have a chance to land on her, but Daniel … well, he doesn’t seem like a lather-rinse-repeat kind of guy, and I’ve seen how hockey players bleed on each other. That can’t be sanitary.”

“What about my dad? Does he give you the germ willies too?”

“No. Not since I got him to buy those preflight vitamin packs to ward off airplane-cabin viruses.”

Bought them, gagged on them, flushed them, I remembered. But I didn’t tell JonPaul; he’d have been so disappointed in my dad and probably too worried to come over to my house again.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy, we’ve been friends since nursery school and always will be, but it’s hard to get his attention. Once you do drag his mind off bacteria and injuries, he’s okay. But keeping a conversation alive with him is a lot of work, and I worry that there aren’t very many people like me who would put that kind of energy into getting past JonPaul’s paranoid outer layer and finding the decent guy inside. It’s not like our other friends bust him for the way he is, but I can tell they’re not as understanding as I am.

JonPaul is nearly six feet tall, with shoulders as broad as a four-lane highway, and he can bench-press me. He’s an über-jock and a gym rat, but he lives in such fear of illness that he never wants to get close enough to anyone to catch anything they might have or be carrying. I didn’t understand how he could play all those full-contact sports if being touched and being breathed on were so abhorrent to him, but when I asked, he got a determined look in his eye and said, “I don’t think about it during the game. I get in the zone and stay there. It’s about discipline.”

He washes his own equipment and uniforms after every practice and game, though, and he takes showers that seem like the kind that workers get after there’s a chemical leak at a nuclear power plant. I heard his mother tell my mother that she has to buy industrial-sized bottles of bleach and boxes of detergent in bulk at the buying club.

I thought we were going to kick back, shoot the bull and watch a movie, but JonPaul couldn’t relax until he’d disinfected his gym clothes. He tossed me a duffel bag.

“Hey, there’s only one pair of shorts and a single T-shirt in here,” I pointed out. “Are you sure you want to wash them all by themselves? We usually wait until there’s a full load.”

He didn’t answer. I looked up to see him reading the ingredients on my mother’s box of presoak powder. I was kind of surprised when he didn’t ooh and aah.

Right. Time to change the subject to what I wanted to talk about. I started the washer and we walked out of the laundry room and crashed on the couch in front of the TV.

“So, hey, you seemed to be pretty friendly with Tina Zabinski at the student government meeting,” I said. “I didn’t know you knew her that well. What’s up?”

“Oh yeah, what were you doing there?” As I suspected, JonPaul had completely forgotten my surprise appearance that morning.

“Broadening my horizons. So, back to Tina—are you two friends?”

“No, not really. She’s just, you know, around.” He pulled a small lunch cooler out of his backpack and became completely engrossed in pouring out individual portions of raw almonds and golden raisins into cereal bowls he’d wrapped in plastic. Undoubtedly after sterilizing them.

I am not easily distracted. “What do you think about her?” I persisted.

“Oh, she’s … hey, I only have enough organic peanut butter left for one sandwich. Wanna share?”

“No, I’m good.” I peered into the jar of what looked like baby diarrhea and then jerked away.

“Looks like baby diarrhea, doesn’t it?” He spread it happily on some whole-wheat, flax-enriched bread and took a hefty bite. “This stuff is so good for your digestive system. Healthy turds float, bro, did you know that? The ones that sink are bad news and mean you’re eating all the wrong stuff and poisoning your own body with toxins like preservatives and additives.”

We. Are. Not. Talking. About. This.

I couldn’t take it anymore, and as he started jotting down the details of his snack in his food log like some obsessive hippie survivalist scientist hybrid, I jumped up from the couch, hollering, “JonPaul, are you okay? Can you hear me? Don’t go toward the light, come back to my voice!”

“What are you talking about? I’m just sitting here adding up my carbs and my protein grams.” JonPaul looked totally freaked out. He should have—I’m very dramatic; I was totally committed to the moment, and I was selling this bit.

“You ate that peanut butter sandwich and twitched and your eyes rolled back in your head and, although it was only for a few seconds and I’m not one hundred percent sure, I coulda sworn you stopped breathing.”

“Probably sudden-onset peanut allergies; I read about that on the AskADoc.com site the other day.” I could see that his hands were shaking. “Do I look okay?”

“Kinda.” I studied his face, frowning.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You look … splotchy. And you seem a little … unsteady.”

“I am dizzy.”

“Low blood sugar,” I said, nodding. “That’s probably all it is. You should lie down for a while.”

“Or maybe eat something?”

“And run the risk of choking to death on your own vomit? What if it’s something more serious?”

“Yeah, buddy, you’re right. I’m gonna bail, head home and go lie down for a while.”

“Smart.” I nodded some more.

JonPaul went off, limping slightly. He’d probably be checking his pulse and taking his temperature all night. That kind of behavior made me more certain than ever that, once he was pushed to batcrap-crazy extremes, he’d be forced to see the depth of his obsessions, and then he’d start to develop a more realistic perspective on the whole health nut thing.

I’d started out on the right foot.

I slid the movie into the machine and watched the car turn into monsters by myself. I kind of missed JonPaul, but at least I could eat bananas dipped in melted chocolate chips and not have to listen to what the processed sugar and hydrogenated fat were going to do to my bathroom habits.

Connie called and talked at me about her committee idea for a while. She asked if we could get together on Wednesday or Thursday to do something and talk about the other thing. I wasn’t really listening. I wondered if England had paid attention to everything France had to say during World War II. I didn’t think so—they were allies, not buddies. That was how I’d think about Connie, too. She just didn’t know we were on the same side, fighting for the good guys to win.

Then Katie emailed me an update of her project outline, with the topic sentences from every paragraph. She asked me to proofread her introduction; it was fine, really top-quality work. That was what I emailed back, even though I didn’t read it. That’s what Delete buttons are for.

The next day at lunch I could see the dark circles under JonPaul’s eyes. He hadn’t been in school all morning.

“I went to see the allergist. Got the scratch test,” he reported. “I’m not allergic to anything.”

“Great! But you can’t be too careful, bud.”

“That’s what I said! But Dr. Culligan said I had to ‘react adversely to the stimuli’ before she could prescribe me anything.”

“What’s in your hand, then?”

“Markie’s EpiPen.”

“You stole an EpiPen from Markie? What if Markie has an allergy attack and needs it? I’m calling his mom to make sure he’s got a backup.”

“He’s got a valid prescription and can get more anytime he wants. Lucky booger. Plus, there are about a million of them lying around over there—they’ll never miss one. And I didn’t steal it—he gave it to me.”

“You just gonna carry it around waiting to stab yourself in the leg?”

“Yeah. Like you said—can’t be too careful. I can tell that my glands are swollen. I think my throat is closing up. Am I wheezing? I think I’m wheezing. I definitely feel like I’m wheezing. Maybe I need an inhaler, too?” He held a carton of cold milk up to his nonfevered head.

Friends don’t let friends wuss out like this.

JonPaul’s weakness could easily be exploited by unscrupulous opposing teams if it wasn’t rooted out of him while he was still young. I was doing this for his own good. As well as the teams he played on.

Looking at it from that perspective, I was helping to make JonPaul a happier, better-adjusted person.

And then he could focus on suggestions about the Tina situation, and if she happened to find out that I was a very thoughtful guy and the best friend anyone could ever have, so much the better.

But I forgot to mention it to him. I was calling Markie’s mom.