Free The Big Crunch by Pete Hautman Page B

has a very top-heavy payroll,” said her dad.
    “You didn’t need to bring that up at dinner. You made everyone very uncomfortable.”
    June had noticed that when things were not going well, her mother always said “you.”
You shouldn’t have blah-blah-blah,
or
You get what you pay for.
But when things went well, it was always “we” and “our.”
We really did a great job. Our presentation was spot on.
    June had learned about that in psychology. It was called
attribution.
When something good happens, people like to take credit for it.
I got a raise because I did a good job.
But when things go bad, that same person likes to
attribute
it to outside forces.
I got fired because my boss is a jerk.
    Her mom was a major league attributor.
    June was not much of an attributor herself. She believed that things just happened, and all you could do was deal with it. Like hitting heads with Wes Andrews, or catching a cold, or moving to a new city.
    Her eye would clear up whether she did anything or not.
    Her cold would go away.
    She would go back to school.
    Her parents would pack up and move again.
    The universe would contract.

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
    T HE NEXT DAY IT DIDN ’ T SEEM SO URGENT that he talk to June. Jerry had probably already told his side of the story — or she had heard it from Phoebe or one of those other girls she hung out with. She would believe it, or she wouldn’t. If she wanted to know what had really happened, she would call him back. And if she didn’t want to know, then he didn’t care what she thought.
    Wes spent most of the day reading a book of “great American short stories” for English. He started out with the shortest story in the book, then read the next shortest, and so on. Some of them were pretty good, but a lot of them he didn’t get what the big deal was, especially the ones where in the end the character figures out that life just plain sucks, which Wes could have told them going in. After a while he got sick of reading and started thinking about calling June again. Maybe she was sitting around nursing her cold, bored out of her mind, wishing the phone would ring. Twice he picked up the phone but didn’t get as far as actually punching in her number.
    That night, after a long and uncomfortable dinner with his parents, Wes shut himself in his room, got on his computer, and did a search for June Edberg. There were a few June Edbergs, but never the right one. He did find her father’s website:
Elton Edberg
Consultants — Workout and Bankruptcy Specialists.
No mention of June on the website, but there were lots of pictures of her dad, always with that same big, white, sharky smile.
    Every hour, like clockwork, June went from her bed to the bathroom to the kitchen — the Bermuda Triangle of staying home sick, from bored to boringer to boringest. Her face looked awful — the bruised area had taken on a greenish cast, and there was a speck of red at the corner of her eye, a ruptured blood vessel. Her entire face hurt when she coughed. She was coughing a lot.
    Her mother had declared herself completely recovered and was off doing something businessy. Right about the time he would be getting out of school, Jerry called. She was finally bored enough to welcome his call.
    “Hey,” she said, sitting up in bed.
    “How are you feeling?” he asked.
    “Terminal. What’s going on?”
    “Nothing. Except I got in a fight with Wes.”
    “You did?” June wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. “You mean like an argument?”
    “No, like he slammed my head against a locker. I had to go to the hospital and get X-rays and stitches.”
    “Seriously? Are you okay?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I thought you guys were friends. Why would he do that?”
    “I don’t know. I think he’s having some kind of mental problems.”
    “Wow.”
    “He got kicked out for the rest of the week. Are you coming to school tomorrow?”
    Tomorrow was too soon. She was hoping she could milk her cold for a few more days to