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Chapter Ten - In a Galaxy Far Far Away


Sunday morning, Lauren went out to go Christmas and grocery shopping first thing in the morning. “You sure you don’t want me to go with you?” I asked. I was standing in the kitchen in boxers and one sock (Nacho had stolen the other one when I shuffled out of it by accident on the stairs), pouring milk into a bowl of Cheerios.

“How can I go Christmas shopping when you’re with me?” Lauren asked, raising an eyebrow.

I shrugged. “I dunno.”

“Also, no offense or anything bu grocery shopping is way easier without you there,” she said.

“Pfft, well fine then,” I said, “Leave me here.”

“You have Ethan to play with you,” she replied, “You two can… do whatever boys do when girls aren’t around. Fart, play with your balls, that sort of thing.” She grabbed her purse off the counter. “Don’t forget to feed Meow Meow.”

“I already fed him.”

“And your dog ate all his food. So feed him again.”

It was true. Mulder hadn’t been fast enough on the food eating front that morning and Nacho had scarfed half the cat food down before Mulder had hissed and swept at him with his claws out.

“I won’t forget,” I said.

Lauren left the room to go, then came back a moment later with my second sock. “This was by the front door,” she said, putting it in my hand.

I leaned down and kissed her. “Thanks. My toes were getting cold.”

“Mmhm,” she kissed me back. “You two stay out of trouble today.”

I wandered out to the living room to eat my Cheerios and turned the TV on, tugging my sock on once I’d put my cereal bowl on the coffee table. I flicked through the channels until I found a documentary about asteroids on Discovery TV and settled back to watch while I crunched. Now most people find documentaries really boring but I really enjoy them. It doesn’t really matter what the topic of them is, I watch them all the time regardless. I’ve learned some pretty random shit, like the meaning of a bunch of Yiddish words and where the phrase Red Neck came from and the layers of the Earth and about solar systems and books I’ll never read and how earthquakes happen and the scientific reason for why the Titanic sank (and believe it or not it’s not just because they hit an iceberg, there was way more to it than that). Today on the documentary, they were talking about this one asteroid, Ceres, that was caught in the sun’s gravitational pull at the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Ceres is apparently a microplanet, like what they ended up deciding Pluto is basically, and they’ve been working on putting a spacecraft on it since 2012, and it was apparently supposed to happen in the next year or so.

“With it’s vast array of minerals, water, and hard surface, Ceres is considered a possibility for human colonization in the future. Though Ceres is considerably cold - negative 105 degrees celsius - it’s still an exciting thought that we could one day have a miniature earth,” the narrator was saying as the camera panned a computer model of the distance between Earth and Ceres.

Suddenly Ethan dropped down beside me on the couch. “Hey,” I said.

“Morning,” he answered. He was dressed in new jeans, a sweatshirt, and had pulled one of the knit caps I’d gotten him over his fluffy locks.

“Nice clothes,” I said.

He smiled as he leaned against the couch and Nacho climbed up and settled on his lap.

On the screen, they shifted to talking about the asteroid belt that Ceres was located in. “The asteroid belt is over 2 astronomical units from the sun, and one astronomical unit thick. Scientists use astronomical units to measure things in space because the numbers are - well, astronomical. Each astronomical units equals out to just about one hundred million miles - 92,955,803 miles to be exact.”

“That’s a lot of miles,” Ethan said.

“I know, right?”

“It’s like that song.”

“Song?”

“You know. I would walk 500 miles and I would walk 500 more…

Dah da lat da, dah da lat da,” I sang, and Ethan laughed. “The Proclaimers. Hell yeah.”

“Despite the density of the asteroid belt, the distances between celestial objects within it are actually quite a good distance apart. In fact, if you were to stand on one asteroid and look out, the next closest asteroid would be extremely difficult to see because it would be so far away. Distances between asteroids in the belt are similar to the distances between Earth and the other rocky planets, or even further.”

I pointed at the TV, “You ever watch these things?” I asked.

“Not a whole lot, sometimes.”

“They’d be better if James Earl Jones narrated all of them.”

“Who’s that?”

“Darth Vader,” I replied.

“The plastic guy in Star Wars?”

I stared at Ethan. I took a deep breath, put my Cheerios bowl down and turned to him. “Tell me you’ve seen Star Wars,” I said.

“I have a feeling I’m going to,” he said.




Lauren came home many hours later as the movies were about to end. Chewie was giving his final howl at the awards ceremony, in fact, as she dropped her keys in the bowl and the dogs went charging out to see her. Granted, we’d only watched the classic trilogy, not the newer episodes movies. A virgin Star Wars viewer need never have their cherry popped by Jar Jar Binks, I figured.

“Okay, I have a new favorite movie,” Ethan declared as the credits started rolling and Lauren walked into the room and looked around. On Ethan’s lap was a bag of popcorn. The coffee table was littered with empty Zevia cans - they looked like a little city skyline. We’d ordered a pizza and the remaining slices of that were still in the open box on the table, a couple crusts that I’d tossed in there. Igby was laying on the floor eating another crust, Nacho had already buried his under the throw pillow on the easy chair. Ethan continued gushing about the movie, “That was awesome.”

Lauren’s eyes roved over the mess, “Well, you guys had fun while I was gone, I see,” she said, carefully stepping over Igby and going for the chair Nacho had buried his crust on.

“There’s a pizza crust under the pillow,” I told her and nodded at Nacho, whose ears had gone up with panic as she’d neared his hiding place.

“Nacho,” she said, a hint of annoyance to her voice. She pulled the pillow off the chair and he leaped up and over to grab the crust and run off, “Eat it, don’t hide it,” she told him. She sat down. She looked exhausted.

“You need help carrying in the bags?” I asked.

She looked confused.

“The grocery bags? From the car?”

“Oh. Oh no. No, I didn’t end up grocery shopping. The, uh, the galleria took too long and it was a colossal stress,” she answered.

“Oh,” I said. “It must’ve been if you been there all day. We watched the entire Star Wars trilogy.” I laughed.

“Yeah,” she said, “It was crazy.” She stood up, “I’ll be right back.” And she went upstairs.

I looked at Ethan and he shrugged.

“I’m gonna go check on her real quick,” I said and I got up and went after her, leaving Ethan in the living room with the still scrolling Star Wars credits and the remains of the pizza.

Upstairs, I went in our bedroom, but Lauren wasn’t in there. I took a deep breath and went back out to the hallway and over to the closed door of the nursery. I knocked gently. “Uh huh,” Lauren called, her voice thick.

I pushed the door open and went inside, closing it behind me. She was sitting in the rocking chair, hugging one of the stuffed animals we’d bought - a monkey we’d made at Build a Bear. “Hey,” I said. I went over and sat on the floor at her feet. Her eyes were puffy and red, tear stains still on her face. I ran my hand over her knee, “Why are you crying?” I asked.

She took a deep breath, “Dr. Walden called, and I answered, I was going to tell him that we decided to take a break from trying but then he said that he had the test results for your sperm sample from last time and that you’re perfectly healthy and that it may be my fault we’re not having a baby. He said my uterus might be hostile but he’d have to run a test and I told him I didn’t wanna take it right now because we’re not trying and he told me to come back when we were again and he’d help us figure out what the best route of action would be and --” she was bawling.

I got up on my knees and pulled her forward to wrap my arms around her. My head leaned against her chest because of the angle we were at and she rested her teary face in my hair.

There was this weird mixture of emotions happening inside me. As painfully awkward as it had been being given a plastic cup and told to go sit in an exam room and whack off ‘til it was full, I was kinda glad now that I’d done it because it had cleared Thor’s name. It wasn’t Thor that was the issue. His sperm were good. He was just getting too much pressure was all. So in a way, I was really glad at the results from Dr. Walden. In another way, I knew how it felt to be the one thinking it was your fault that there wasn’t a baby in the crib that loomed behind me. I felt bad for Lauren.

“I’m sorry,” she said after a few minutes, snuffling and pulling away. She ran her hands over my hair where her face had smooshed it down. “I’m sorry, I know you don’t wanna talk about this stuff right now.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

She shook her head, “After the appointment, I just… wandered kind of aimlessly around town. I didn’t get anything much done.”

“I understand, baby,” I answered.

She swept her hand over her eyes. “How can I want something so much and my body be so against me?” she asked thickly.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Biology, I guess.”

“Fuck biology,” she mumbled.

“Yeah, fuck biology,” I agreed.

Lauren’s face was all teary and smeared. I rubbed my hand on her thigh soothingly. “I’m gonna take a shower,” she said.

“Okay,” I nodded, “I’ll get the mess cleaned up downstairs.”

“Did you and Ethan have a good time?”

“Yeah, he’d never seen Star Wars before.”

“Wow,” Lauren said, looking surprised even through the teary eyes.

“Yeah.”

She paused, “Does he have, like, I dunno, school or something in the morning?”

“I… have no idea,” I replied. I realized I hadn’t asked him about school yet. “I’ll find out.”

“Okay,” she answered. “Thank you baby.” She kissed my forehead and I got up. She left the monkey on the chair and we closed the nursery door shut behind us as we went out to the hallway.

Back downstairs, I walked into the living room to find Ethan had already cleared all the soda cans and the pizza box off the table. I found him in the kitchen, opening cupboard doors. “What’cha lookin’ for?” I asked him.

“A plate to put the leftover pizza in the fridge on,” he answered.

“Two cupboards toward me,” I said. He opened it and got out a plate and came back to the counter where the box sat open still. He lifted the pizza slices out and onto the plate. “Thanks for cleaning up,” I said.

“No problem,” he answered. “Is Lauren okay?”

“Yeah, she’s okay.”

“She looked sad,” he said.

“Yeah, but she’s okay, we talked.”

“Was she upset about the mess?” he asked.

“No,” I answered, shaking my head.

Ethan put the plate in the fridge. “I thought maybe she was upset we made a mess,” he said.

“Nawh, Lauren doesn’t care about stuff like that, as long as it gets picked up after,” I answered with a shrug. “And even then she just nags about it, she doesn’t really get upset. Like I leave my clothes laying around a lot, I’m bad at throwing them in the hamper, and she’ll be like why don’t you use the hamper instead of the carpet for once, but she’s not really angry or nothin’.”

Ethan laughed ‘cos I’d imitated Lauren when I’d said the hamper bit and it’d sounded more like Elmo or a seagull than Lauren’s voice.

“So… anyways. She wanted me to ask you if you have school or something tomorrow?”

Ethan looked down, “No.”

“No school?”

“No. I don’t go to school.”

“Why?”

Ethan hesitated. He looked up at me after a long pause and answered, “Because. The guys there are jerks.” He rubbed his arm, “I mean, they’ve always been jerks. They used to make fun of me ‘cos my clothes weren’t as cool and sometimes I didn’t have time to wash them ‘cos I was taking care of everything else at home and also doing homework and everything, and they’d beat me up and stuff. They called me Po’ Boy.”

I frowned.

“Then my dad… when he went to rehab, he drove into a tree on the way home from McCreery’s and of course the stupid tree had to be on one of those guys’ lawn and they knew all about what happened and that my dad was taken away by a police man and stuff and they told everybody at school. And everything had kinda fallen apart for me, so I was out for a couple days when he first went to rehab and stuff and when I got back to school everyone thought all these rumors that jackass had spread around was true and nobody wanted to be near me and they all made fun of me. And then my Dad’s house went into foreclosure and there was this social worker that said I had to stay in the group home they’d put me in, but I didn’t want to, so that’s when I ran away and I didn’t go back to school ‘cos I figured if I did they’d know where to find me and they’d make me go back to the group home.” He shrugged, “School’s stupid anyway, anything I learn there I can learn from a book.”

“School isn’t stupid,” I said. “You don’t wanna grow up without being book smart, trust me. I didn’t finish school ‘cos I didn’t think I’d need to ‘cos I was in the band and everything but I really wish I’d studied more. I mean I don’t really need a degree or anything ‘cos I made it okay, but first of all I got really lucky and second of all it’s not fun being the dumb one in a conversation, you know?”

Ethan nodded.

“I mean, I have my GED now, and I wouldn’t mind taking like some online college courses someday or something, but… Yeah, trust me, you wanna finish school. Maybe you could enroll at a different school, so you don’t gotta deal with those guys anymore,” I suggested.

Ethan nodded again. “I guess so.”

“I mean it’s awful close to the winter break now anyway to enroll now,” I added, because he looked sick to his stomach at the thought. He looked up. “But promise once your dad gets out that you’ll get enrolled at a school and finish. Study real hard, make something great of yourself. Don’t just work retail and burger flippin’ your whole life, ‘cos y’know that’s about all you can do without a degree these days, and I believe that you deserve better than that.”

“Okay,” he agreed. “I will.”