More Than Enough by John Fulton Page B

accident,” I said.
    â€œIt’s a good thing your mother’s a nurse,” Sandy said, noticing my mother’s all-white Oak Groves uniform. Then she read my T-shirt out loud. “Team Player. You must be on the basketball team. That how you hurt your arm?” People always thought I was a basketball player because of my height.
    â€œNo.” I hated it when I had to tell people I didn’t play the sport, especially after Mr. Bryant had asked me to try out for the team. It made me feel like a failure at something I had never done.
    â€œShe must do something, though,” Sandy said, gesturing at Jenny’s uniform.
    â€œI’m on the drill team,” Jenny said.
    My mother smiled. “My son is always getting hurt,” she said. I guessed she’d said that just to be pleasant and conversational, since it was hardly true. I was a cautious, unathletic kid who almost never got hurt. In my free time, I did things like read—mostly science fiction novels. I liked to sit around and think about the possibility of other planets out there being populated by intelligent life. That was one of my favorite thoughts, even though it seemed unlikely, even though I was more or less convinced that the earth was the only minuscule spot of life in all of space and time. It was nice to think that we were not entirely alone. I also liked to build models—mostly of war planes from World War II—though they were expensive, and at fifteen I was getting too old for that sort of thing. I thought a lot about war, whether I would or would not be afraid, what it would be like to kill or be killed. I thought about being a pilot, about flying, about doing that despite the fact that my vision was imperfect. (My mother would often remind me that military pilots needed to have perfect eyesight.) I wanted to see the earth, America, Salt Lake City, the Downs, my street, our little duplex from the sky, where everything, lakes and mountains, seemed tiny and insignificant and under your power. Otherwise, I did not have a lot of interests. If I didn’t have my face in a book, I was watching TV. My favorite programs other than sci-fi shows were the nature documentaries about the struggles of the insect world, about microbes and bacteria, about the carnivores of Africa. That was drama, and the fact that that sort of struggle was not fictionalized, was real, gave me a charge even though I was anything but a carnivore of Africa, even though I was this pale ectomorph with straight black hair that, no matter how often I washed it, was always a little greasy and lay flat on my head. I wasn’t the most handsome kid, especially in contrast to my sister and mother, who were beauties. Later, I would become better-looking. But at that time, I was in an ugly phase. The fine wire rims and oval lenses of my new eyeglasses gave me a sophisticated, intellectual look that I’d never had before. But that wasn’t quite enough. With my shirt off, I was all bones, sternum, ribs, and clavicles. A triangular patch of acne above my nose flared up weekly, bloody and conspicuous because I couldn’t stop myself from bothering it, picking at it. I was awkward, avoided social situations, and probably hated myself a little more than the average teenager. The fact that I’d stood up to Danny Olsen and fought him was less a reflection of me and more about a generalized anger I’d felt at that time in my life, toward nothing or everything so far as I could tell. I’d just be pissed off, bitter on some days, and had no idea what to do with it, how to use it, if anger was useful, which was not a question I knew how to answer. As I would see later, I certainly didn’t know how to use it on the day that Mr. Warner died.
    â€œThat’s not true,” I said. “I’m not always getting hurt.”
    My mother smiled. She was not going to be dragged into a tussle in front of our waitress. She was settling