Fum Read online

  Contents

  Part 1

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Part 2

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Part 3

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  Epilogue

  In the guidance counselor’s office of Lugo Memorial High School — a ten-by-twelve-foot bunker situated in the basement of the stout three-story rectangular limestone building — sits Corinthia Bledsoe, elbows on thighs, her wood splitter’s hands cradling her face, her mosquito-bitten knees trembling only as infinitesimally as knees this large can tremble.

  As advised by the adult sitting across from her, Corinthia is inhaling and exhaling through her nose, the troubled breaths sluicing through the great caves of her nostrils, tainting the tenaciously humid late-August air of the sublevel public-school office.

  “In and out, through the nose, just like that,” she hears.

  Corinthia was escorted here by the firm, resolute, not to mention hairy-in-a-storybook-ogre-way hands of Virgil Task, Lugo Memorial’s varsity football coach. Coach Task, stalwart as a fire hydrant, with dark tufts swirling through the open collar of his knit cream-and-crimson athletic-department shirt, was aided by Gene Hauser, the algebra II teacher and JV math team mentor. Mr. Hauser trailed behind them in a gymnastics-spotting fashion, ready to help should anyone collapse, blow out a knee, or sprain an ankle. Yes, that was indeed Gene Hauser, rarely seen beyond the confines of his classroom (which doubles as the math lab), whose personal scent Corinthia found to be suspiciously mulchy, as if he’d been spending all morning in a garden, digging up cabbages.

  Guidance Counselor Denton Smock’s office, which is painted the color of cougar eyes, boasts a phantasmagoric lavender-and-cotton-candy-colored aquarium; a kind of undulating liquid brain, which is home to, among an assortment of underwater wisteria and banana plants, a lone striped clown fish, whose almost staggeringly inactive floating state is the one thing Corinthia relates to at this moment.

  “Is it alive?” Corinthia finally asks, referring to the fish.

  Mr. Smock has been waiting for her to speak for twelve minutes. He knows that it’s been precisely twelve minutes because he measures such things. There is a small digital clock on his desk that reports minutes and seconds in pulsing blue numerals. He keeps all of his “waiting” data logged in a little spiral notebook of lima-bean-green graph paper: minutes, followed by a colon, followed by seconds. Row upon row of “waiting” statistics with student initials beside each entry. If one were to find this notebook on, say, the pilling wool sofa in the Wallace Keebler Faculty Lounge, one might mistake Mr. Smock for the Lugo Memorial track and field coach. The meticulously gathered data could easily be misconstrued as recorded relay splits. He’s especially interested in student silences and their accompanying behavior: how a body leans away from the steady, relentless thrum of the overhead fluorescent light; what the shoulders do during one of his unblinking, half-smiling stare-downs. Do a student’s shoulders disappear into the back or seize up and crowd the neck? Does the left shoulder sit higher than the right, or vice versa? As far as Mr. Smock is concerned, he doesn’t need language to make student assessments. The anxious body of the fourteen- to eighteen-year-old says it all.

  “Rodney is very much alive,” Mr. Smock replies about his clown fish, whose stripes alternate between blood-orange and white so perfectly, it’s like a thing that’s been painted with great care. A forgotten heirloom found at a garage sale. “After his lunch, he likes to float.”

  Speaking of fish, not quite an hour ago, at precisely 2:23 p.m., in Bob Sluba’s life sciences class, in the middle of Lugo Memorial’s oldest and most-beloved teacher’s articulation of the marine-life relationship between bottom-feeding krill and phytoplankton, Corinthia Bledsoe, in an impassioned, heraldic one-part move, rocketed up from her custom-made desk and announced to Mr. Sluba and her seventeen fellow life sciences students that a family of tornadoes — three in total — was making a beeline toward Lugo, directly toward the small community’s high school, in fact, and that everyone, students and teachers alike, should get to a safe place and assume the proper tornado position: hands clasped at the back of necks, knees on the floor, rumps kissing heels, chins tucked into chests. It’s a vaguely religious-looking position, a supplication, even, as if a mass bowing of heads will somehow turn away God’s angry weather beasts.

  It is late August, after all, and the stubborn, insufferable humidity — that thick southern Illinois air that coats the skin like gelatin — often coincides with extreme weather alerts, especially in this part of the state, where tornadoes touch down as often as lightning along the fairways of certain Florida golf courses. Which is to say that tornado paranoia is not uncommon here. There were three warnings in July alone, although no funnels actually materialized in Lugo.

  “Horn’s gonna wail,” Corinthia simply states, still catching her breath. Her deep voice is unusually high and reedy.

  She’s referring to the tornado horn, of course, whose earsplitting siren is so loud, it sounds as if it’s being blown from some fabled, invisible Midwestern mountain. The actual horn, as unthreatening-looking as a chipmunk cleaning its paws atop a fence post, is attached to a one-hundred-foot aluminum rod at the outskirts of town and spins 360 degrees while blaring Federal Signal 2001-130, which warns that a tornado has been spotted at a dangerously close proximity and that one and all should seek immediate shelter, preferably underground.

  “Why the need to personify a municipal warning system?” Mr. Smock says. “Children wail. Children and emotionally distraught widows in wagon train movies.”

  Corinthia is well aware that he is dismissing her prediction, which she is smart enough to know seems ludicrous — in her very large heart, she truly understands this — but to be scorned with such mockery, to drag wagon train movies into it! It makes her want to kick the front of his desk, but she resists the impulse and continues wiggling her knee.

  “You’ll see,” she warns solemnly.

  Mr. Smock nods and smiles. His job is to be sympathetic, after all. His lips sort of disappear as he thinks. For some reason this look makes Corinthia wonder whether or not he possesses nipples, or, rather, if under his clothes he is some other kind of being: a fish person with gills. Instead of a penis, does he possess a little hidden ventral fin? A spout? Mr. Sluba might be able to diagram such a thing on his life sciences whiteboard.

  “And you claim these tornadoes were something you saw,” Mr. Smock says, still trying to make sense of the matter.

  “Yes,” Corinthia replies.

  “Out the window?”

  “In my head,” she says.

  “So you were asleep,” he says. “I know how your medication can make you drowsy.”

  “I was about as drowsy as a wet dog caught on an electric fence.”

  The image seems to cause Mr. Smock’s face to twitch, just at one corner of his mouth. It’s barely perceptible, but it’s certainly a twitch — indeed it is. At this moment, very little slips past Corinthia Bledsoe. Glimpsing those tornadoes has somehow tweaked her entire sensory system. According to Mr. Sluba, the normal human being possesses five senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. But today Corinthia is keenly aware that something beyond this arrangement is at play. She can feel the ozone in the air, hear the humidity creeping through Mr. Smock’s little moldy office, and practically taste the cheap, yeasty foot powder whose scent is wafting up from under his gunmetal desk.

  “So then your eyes were open when you beheld this trio of tornadoes?”
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  “To behold something carries with it a connotation of beauty,” Corinthia says.

  Mr. Smock appears to be stumped. What little color lives in his face has gone away. That tan he worked so hard on this past summer while vacationing in the Michigan sand dunes has turned a pale, waxy blue.

  “I suppose you’re right,” he finally admits.

  “And trio?” Corinthia says, almost bitterly. “It’s not a singing group.”

  He asks her what word she would use to qualify the three tornadoes. “A trinity?” he suggests before she can answer.

  “A triumvirate,” she replies in a beleaguered voice. “A trinity refers to a Christian godhead. Triumvirates are solely about power and destruction.”

  “Well,” he says, “there’s apparently nothing wrong with that vocabulary of yours.”

  Corinthia won the past two Lugo Memorial spelling bees. Last year, as a sophomore, she defeated senior valedictorian Sophia Bristol-Soffit, and as a freshman, in the final round, she wowed everyone by spelling aerenchyma without skipping a beat. For that bee, she defeated junior Junior Zobrist, who is rumored to be headed to MIT next year.

  It’s important to point out that Corinthia Bledsoe’s desk is custom-made because when she stands at her full height, she is seven feet four and a quarter inches tall.

  And she weighs 287 pounds.

  Regular school desks just don’t work for her. By all definitions, be they medical, standard, mythical, or otherwise, Corinthia Lee Bledsoe of Lugo, Illinois, born in the birthing ward of St. Joseph’s Hospital up north in Joliet, just off Interstate 55, is a giant. She built the desk in shop class. Fashioned from pine and featuring a meticulously sanded, lacquered finish, whose sloped lid contains grooves for pens and pencils, it emits a faint, pleasant smell of resin and wood glue, collapses conveniently at its hinged, outermost edge, and folds in half for easy transport.

  Although she is broad-shouldered, with enormous hands and equally enormous feet (size 22, men’s), she has penetrating deep-brown eyes that not only balance her face, but also radiate a loving warmth and at times a generous, childlike vulnerability. These eyes belie her Paul Bunyanesque skull and monumental chin. And despite her teeth, which are as long, wide, and dimpled as dominoes, Corinthia possesses a full, attractive mouth. She has learned to maneuver her lips in such a manner as to reveal only a portion of this haunting, epic dentition.

  At the onset of her puberty — at around age eleven and a half — a tumor attached itself to Corinthia Bledsoe’s pituitary gland and caused her condition, gigantism, to manifest with nothing less than an undeserved, almost biblical tenacity. By her fourteenth birthday, she was a staggering six feet nine and a half inches tall, larger than most professional basketball players.

  And she’s grown almost seven inches since then.

  Yes, she is a giant.

  She is gigantic.

  Because of those magnetic pupils and lovely mouth, her face defies the usual clichés ascribed to the monolithic storybook ogre, the grotesque monster with the cauliflower brow and sunken Beowulf eyes. Corinthia possesses a girlish, nicely positioned nose, unblemished skin, and cinnamon-colored hair, which she often pulls back into a classic ponytail.

  But despite this beauty, by medical definition, Corinthia Lee Bledsoe, daughter of Brill and Marlene Bledsoe, sister to senior star wide receiver Channing “The Lugo Heat” Bledsoe (who is a mere six two, 185 pounds), is still a giant.

  Thus, the very large heart and need for a special desk.

  She and her shop teacher, Dolan Yorn-Pamutmut, whose hyphenated name is as mysterious as his missing left ear, chose pine because it’s both a lightweight and extremely sturdy wood.

  So, to say the least, the act of Corinthia Bledsoe reaching full verticality — exploding up from her custom-made portable desk — is nothing less than a thrilling event and a celebration of the genetic mysteries of the human race, certainly more thrilling than microscopic phytoplankton and nonexploding krill and Mr. Sluba’s glabrous Benjamin Franklin face, especially when everyone else is sitting down at standard-size Illinois School District – issued desks, collectively fighting through post-lunch digestion comas (pizza pockets, lima beans, and fruit cups [which were mostly green grapes and little wedges of room-temperature melon]), everyone except for Mr. Sluba, who, at a modest five nine, often assumes a slightly bowlegged southwestern rancher’s stance, perpetually within arm’s reach of the science department’s archaic manually operated overhead projector.

  Some say he dates it like he would a woman.

  As Corinthia sits across from Guidance Counselor Smock, whose thin, smooth face defies age and whose outward patience verges on ecclesiastical, her pine desk, which was collapsed and brought to the basement by Mr. Sluba himself, leans against the wall beside her.

  “Do you think you’re making the most of your junior year, Corinthia?” he asks. It’s an oddly general question, considering the circumstances.

  “Yes,” she replies, although the past few days haven’t been easy. Not because of any one incident or her health challenges. Not because Corinthia has grown more and more aware of the acute feeling of not caring. Ineffectual is the word she’s heard before. Or the phrase lack of affect. Her schoolwork has been excellent. Based on her grade point average, she’s currently ranked third in her class, and her attendance is impeccable. And yet this lingering blankness has been metastasizing somewhere deep inside her, like a small, cold stone slowly gaining mass, perhaps the phantom cousin of that tumor that attached itself to her pituitary gland some five and a half years ago.

  “Have you thought more about where you might want to go to college?” Mr. Smock asks.

  About a month ago, Corinthia was drawn to Northland, a small college in Wisconsin’s remote upper hinterlands. The thing that grabbed her attention was the expanse of tall trees featured in their modest four-color brochure. Ancient black spruces, seemingly hundreds of feet high, an endless forest of them. Corinthia could see herself walking among these trees, drunk with the smell of pine, not a care in the world, no cumbersome door moldings or low classroom archways to negotiate, striding out in the open air, where hawks and eagles soar.

  The campus of Northland College, home of the LumberJacks and LumberJills, is located in Ashland, Wisconsin. Its curriculum is geared toward the environment and sustainability. Corinthia likes the fact that their student population isn’t mentioned in any of their marketing materials, which probably means that it’s very small. The campus is located a mere ten-minute walk from the shores of Lake Superior.

  Corinthia daydreams about shedding all her clothes and wading into this Great Lake, swimming out an impossible distance and just floating there on her back while staring up at the endless night sky, the stars wheeling above her as she waits for some prehistoric creature to emerge from the depths and lead her to the next phase of her life.

  Floating in Lake Superior like Mr. Smock’s little striped clown fish, Rodney.

  “You continue to generate keen interest from Northwestern, Marquette, even the University of Chicago,” Mr. Smock says, clearly attempting to keep the conversation focused on practical matters. “Those scores of yours are piquing real interest from the big boys.”

  The scores that he refers to are Corinthia’s SATs, which she took at the end of her sophomore year, along with three other accelerated classmates. She found the test so stultifyingly easy that it actually bored her. And it was also just plain absurd. The idea of one’s immediate future being dictated by the act of filling out endless arrangements of ovals with a number two pencil makes Corinthia want to pursue a vocation as a cashier at, say, the local gas station (Pewman’s Gas and Go), just to spite all the career-crazed adults in her life. Wouldn’t she be something to behold? After filling up the SUV, one would enter the little kiosk and — KA-BLAM — there she’d be, all seven feet four and a quarter inches of her, a veritable mountain of customer-service flesh, the crown of her head practically scraping the ceiling.

 
“I’ve spoken with your parents,” Mr. Smock continues, “and I think they’re coming around to the idea of Northwestern.”

  Her parents have mentioned no such conversation, and the fact that her guidance counselor is going behind her back to speak to them makes her want to snatch his notebook off his desk and tear it in half.

  “Your mom seems quite taken with the North Shore of Chicago,” he continues. “Northwestern boasts a legacy of extraordinary alums.”

  “The Wildcats,” Corinthia utters.

  “The purple-and-white,” Smock adds, citing the university’s colors.

  “What exactly is a wildcat anyway?” Corinthia asks.

  “I believe a wildcat is any cat that is wild.”

  “Wild meaning feral?”

  “Sure,” he answers. “Feral.”

  “A state of savagery,” she adds, “especially after escape from captivity or domestication.”

  Mr. Smock asks Corinthia if she’s thinking of college as an escape.

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Have you been feeling trapped?” he adds.

  Corinthia is suddenly aware of the buzzing overhead fluorescent; the whirring, burbling aquarium; and another mysterious tremor that seems to be emanating from somewhere deep under the school building.

  “Do you feel that?” Corinthia asks.

  “Feel what?” Mr. Smock says.

  Corinthia squints, trying to home in on the source of the tremor. Is she the only person who can feel this? Does the tremor have anything to do with the tornadoes? Is it coming from inside her?

  “Look, it’s hot,” Mr. Smock offers, fanning himself with a pamphlet that reads SMARTPHONE DEPENDENCY: Is a Device Ruling Your Life?

  Corinthia recently gave up her large-format smartphone. Despite its bigger dimensions, it was still too small. Whenever she’d arrange it against her face to speak, the mouthpiece barely cleared her cheekbone. Communicating with anyone effectively required her to toggle the device between her ear and chin, which made it look like she was using a man’s electric razor. She tried a set of earbuds, but even the largest ones kept falling out. Now the phone, not much smaller than a standard-size digital tablet, lives in a shoe box on her dresser at home.