Heaven Should Fall by Rebecca Coleman

“fuck it” stage at that point. He’d graduated high school a year before and had been working with Dodge ever since, managing the U-Store-It, and since then he’d gotten a lot quieter—part Clint Eastwood, part serial killer.
    Sure enough, I found him in the last unit on the right, lifting. He was lying on his back on the bench, with an impressive amount of weight on the crossbar. His shirt was hiked up and under it, his gut was jiggling with every pump of the bar. Elias’s body was like one big temper tantrum. If Dodge brought home doughnuts one Sunday, Elias would eat as if his own execution was the next day, and I swear he’d go up by five pounds overnight. But now that he’d taken to secret weight lifting, in no time he was bulking up like the Incredible Hulk. Unfortunately it still had all the doughnuts on top of it, so mostly he just looked fatter.
    He clunked the bar back in place and sat up once he noticed me there. It’s not as if I ever dropped by just to say hello, so he knew something was up. He fanned out his shirt at the front—it had a big V of sweat down it—and asked, “You need something?”
    “I got a problem, man.”
    Now, Elias was a good guy. He was the guy you called in the middle of the night if you snuck out to see your girlfriend and then inadvertently locked yourself out of the house, or if you needed an emergency ride back from, say, Massachusetts, or had to borrow fifty bucks. Stuff like that didn’t shake him. He’d just go. And so it surprised me when he shot me this glare . The kind where a person’s eyes look to be two different sizes and one of them is twitching underneath. He got up and started yanking weights off the bar.
    “I’ll bet you do,” he said. “I sure as hell bet you do.”
    For the life of me I didn’t know what was up his ass. Mentally I went over anything I might have done wrong to him lately, but nothing came to mind. Whatever it was, I figured he had to be on the wrong track, so I said, “Piper’s pregnant.”
    “Oh, I know.”
    That was unexpected. “No, you don’t. How would you know that?”
    “A friend of a friend told me.”
    “Who?”
    “None of your business.” He clunked the weights back on the storage bars.
    Asking more wasn’t going to get me anywhere, so I gave up. “I don’t know what to do. I’m completely freaked.”
    “Shoulda thought about that before you nailed her, shouldn’t you?” The bench was between us now, and even though he was standing normally his bigger arms made the stance look threatening. I stood there feeling all sheepish, and his face shifted to this look of total disgust. “Fuck you, Cadey ,” he said, using Dodge’s asshole nickname for me. “Fuck you sideways.”
    By then I didn’t know what to say anymore. I’d sort of figured out what his reaction was about, but I didn’t know where to go with that. I didn’t know where to go at all . There were a lot of boxes lying around, and I sat down on the closest one behind me and planted my elbows against my knees, dropped my head down and started to cry.
    “Jesus Christ,” said Elias. No chance was I going to look up at him, but I could feel him standing there looking at me, stuck on what to do. When he was much younger, eight or nine at the most, our father used to come down really hard on him for crying. He’d shove Elias down into a chair and bend over him, screaming himself hoarse, one fist up all threateningly, like someone about to beat a dog with a newspaper.
    Elias came around the bench and sat on the box next to me. All I could see were his shoes, beat-up sneakers stretched all wide at the bottom. I was still making little gasping, sniveling noises and wiping my nose against my shoulder. It was bad. Years later the memory still makes me cringe.
    “What am I supposed to do about that problem?” he finally said. “I can’t unfuck her for you.”
    “Don’t tell Mom and Dad.”
    “I won’t.”
    “If Dad finds out—”
    “He isn’t