Henry Franks A Novel - By Peter Adam Salomon Page 0,5

shirt showed part of his chest.

He took a breath, counted to ten, exhaled.

“Any vacation plans now that school is out?” Dr. Saville reached for her pen and loudly clicked it open, waiting.

“No.” As he shook his head, brown hair swirled away from his face and he smiled. “I know, Doctor,” he said, “no one-word answers. I remember that.”

She smiled in reply and the pen flew across the paper. “So, what about Justine?”

“She’s a friend, I guess.”

“Friends are good.”

“Girlfriends are better,” he said, and let his hair fall back into his eyes.

“Anyone in particular?”

“No, no one. Not yet.”

“Does ‘no one’ have a name?”

Henry scratched his wrist with his discolored finger, then clenched his hands together. “No.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“I don’t think anyone at school even knows my name,” Henry said before brushing the hair back from his eyes.

“Justine does.”

“She lives next door, she has to.” He smiled as the sun broke through the clouds and lightened the room. The palm frond brushing against the window fell silent.

“She has to be friends with you?”

“No, I guess not.”

“Does she talk to you?” Dr. Saville asked.

He laughed. “It’s Justine. All she does is talk.”

“That’s good, right?”

“Good?”

“Her talking to you, Henry,” she said. “How would you feel if she stopped?”

He took a deep breath, and then rubbed his hands over his face. “Doesn’t help.”

“With?”

“Life? Memory?”

“Dreams?”

He slid down in his seat, hiding behind his hair as he tensed up. He nodded, once.

“The old dream, Henry?”

Again, the nod.

“How long has it been? Months?” She flipped through her notebook, then tapped her pen against her leg. “Did something happen?”

Henry looked at her, and then reached for his backpack. He pulled out a card and handed it to her.

HAPPY FIRST BIRTHDAY, SON! blared a smiling cartoon father balancing a cake on a unicycle.

Dr. Saville read the card, then passed it back.

“He gave it to me yesterday,” Henry said.

“Why?”

“I woke up a year ago.”

“Then the dream last night?” she asked.

“Again.”

“Anything new?”

“I didn’t die,” Henry said. “Does that count?”

“Well, that’s something, at least,” Dr. Saville said. “Anything else?”

“She died this time.”

four

From where Henry lay on his bed, he watched the sunlight cast shadows on the wall. It was already hot, despite central air and the ceiling fan, and even in boxers and a T-shirt, he’d woken up drenched in sweat. Scars like railroad tracks leading nowhere circled around his legs and itched in the heat.

Out his window he had a view of a corner of Justine’s front yard where her younger brother was bouncing a ball against their house. Justine was nowhere to be seen. He closed the blinds, dry-swallowed his pills, and walked downstairs in the empty house. A bowl sat on the table next to a box of cereal, waiting for him, but his father had long since left for work. A piece of paper fluttered to the ground when he pulled his chair out.

Henry, he read as he poured the milk, Sorry about the card.

From the street, a car blew its horn, and Henry walked to the front door to look outside. A pickup truck, overloaded with cheerleaders, sat in front of Justine’s house. As he watched, she jumped into the back and then they were gone. Her brother continued bouncing his ball as Henry went back to breakfast.

He pulled the card out of his backpack and leaned it against the base of his monitor. One year. He rested the tip of his finger on one of the pushpins, staring at the patchwork flesh of his hand. The more he stared at it, the stranger it looked. The scar interrupted the lines on his palm, no longer telling any future he could imagine. Only the past interested him anymore. His own past. Even his name seemed to weigh strangely on him and the more he repeated it to himself, the less it seemed like a real word at all.

The scrapbook lay where he’d left it, open to the picture of his mother, but no matter how long he studied her face, he couldn’t remember her; it was as if a stranger held his hand. Even his own face was alien to him, and he’d spent hours one night looking at his reflection trying to remember himself. He’d cried himself to sleep that night, face buried in the pillow, afraid his father would hear his sobs.

Beneath the picture, his father had written Mommy, Daddy, Henry with a ballpoint pen. The pages were falling out of the book due to how often he flipped through it; the flimsy photo