by Scott Brown
“Slow down, Rafty.”
“—ask her out on a date inside of two weeks, or else…I’ll ask her.”
Rafty—and maybe this was part of why he aspired to a life in media-slash-promotion-slash-advertising—thought impossible things could be made true and real just by saying them or printing them on very ugly flyers with stock images and bad clip art. Rafty thought he was a marketing wizard in the making, but really he was just an optimist, and his “marketing” was a form of prayer, and I guess that’s why I liked him: I’m not really an optimist, and ever since Mom died, I have trouble with the whole prayer thing. (I wasn’t particularly good at it before she died.) But there are moments (like, say, when you have a go-for-broke plan to confess your love for a good friend) when even a pessimist needs a little optimism, and some prayers you can’t say for yourself. Rafty’d been optimizing hard enough for both of us since sixth grade.
“I think, Rafty, that whatever it is you’re imagining—”
“A campaign. I think of it as a campaign. We’re not really fighting. It’s more like the cola wars—it lifts everybody’s stock—”
“Okay, the campaign you’re imagining? Probably ends with Sidney requesting new lab partners.”
“I find your lack of faith disturbing.” Rafty grinned. “Star Wars, dawg! Oh, and hey, happy birthday! I got you something! Some things! Plural!”
He pulled out two individually wrapped presents, baby-blue paper, silver bows, each the size of a small trout.
“Rafty! Dude. That’s amazing, but…we don’t do presents! Do we?”
“We do now, mon frère. I was reading this whole thread about how it’s good for men to give each other presents. So c’mon! Unwrap, unbox, go! Go!”
I unwrapped. I unboxed.
It was a two-inch lift. For my shoes. On the back, in gold letters, were the words WE HOOKED UP ALREADY.
“Shit!” said Rafty. “I was supposed to hand you the other one first.”
The other one said IF YOU CAN READ THIS.
“Riiiight?” Rafty grinned and nodded. “Try ’em on, I wanna see if they work. My theory is: Be the change you want to see in the world. Walk tall, and you are tall. Mind over matter. C’mon, try ’em on!”
I looked around at the crowded hallway. “Here?”
“Okay, good point. Wear ’em to the game tonight! Test my theory!”
Rafty and only Rafty could get away with giving me a gift this awful, this clumsy. Once upon a time, I’d had no words to describe Rafty. Then Monica called him “tactless but harmless,” and Rafty didn’t mind that. “Truth in advertising is good,” he said.
We were a funny pair, Rafty and I. United by stature, and a mutual, only somewhat rational hatred of the Duke Blue Devils, and an impossible dream of dunking. (Ever since Drew shot up, I’d played hoops only with Rafty, using the rusty Pro Slam in his driveway.) Roderick Raftsman Rhinehardt Royall, a little kid with a long, stupid name, tried for years to get people to call him Rod, or Rowdy Roddy, or (for a brief, strange time) Ted, but Rafty is what stuck. (“My early branding strategies, I now see, did not bear fruit.”)
Rafty and I had both been called many things, all of them worse than “Rafty.” We’d been the two littlest guys in middle school, see. We’d been bullied together. That was the other thing we shared. Drew and I, we had a lot in common, but not that. Bullying is a foxhole bond.
Jared Zigler. Spencer Inskip. Eric Forchette. I’d attracted my fair share of assholes, shit-hearted young swains who saw a lot of comic potential in my tiny body. Some of their routines were pretty inventive. The Display Case, for example. A classic of physical comedy.
There was a large display case in the hall outside the wood shop—intended, I guess, for objects made in wood shop. Either it hadn’t caught on or people weren’t that proud of what they made in wood shop, because it sat derelict, the catch on its glass door broken.
All those big, empty display shelves had given Jared Zigler an idea.
He and some minion from his doom squad of neckless griefers rounded us up one day, Rafty and me, carried us up a rolling ladder, and placed us on the highest shelves. Get it? Two elves on shelves. Too scared to move. Too funny, right?
Then they’d thrown tennis balls at us. Hard.
So that was a very bad middle school day. But it also turned out to be my lucky day.
Lucky, because Monica had school-choiced her way into our district. (She’d decided it was the only school for her, and she’d figured out, on her application, how to make the San Diego school system see things precisely the same way she did.)
Lucky, because Monica was a genius.
And also a bit of a maniac.
Monica had been in wood shop that day.
She spent most of seventh grade in there, cutting her first longboard from the blank. That’s what she was doing when she heard the thwock! of tennis balls and the frightened yelps of captive shelf elves.
She’d moseyed out of shop—I remember this so clearly, in such brilliant HD, that it hurts—and she was wearing a beat-up hoodie the dull red of road rash, Wranglers she’d rescued from a Goodwill bin, a beige shop apron, and a brindled earflapped knit cap of her own creation, with jagged spikes of black hair peeking out. Her eyes were the green of burning copper, the green of illegal fireworks.
And, oh yeah: she had a circular saw swinging at her hip.
Suddenly it was just the five of us in that hall. A tumbleweed blowing through might’ve been a nice touch. Instead, a distant toilet flushed. Nice.
Monica hadn’t said anything. Just stared at Jared and company.
“What?” Jared said finally.
“I can’t find the teacher,” Monica said, in her deadest, flattest zombie voice. “I don’t know where he went.”
“That’s my problem?”
“It’s so dangerous,” Monica said, “to leave seventh graders alone with working shop equipment.”
VRIMMM!
The saw hopped to life in Monica’s hand. And that’s when Jared finally noticed: it had been plugged in the whole time. Shit was live.
“Unsupervised seventh graders,” Monica went on, “are responsible for sixty-two percent of wood shop accidents nationwide. It’s very sad. We can do better.”
VRIMMM!
She took a step toward Jared.
Jared took a step backward. His wingdouche followed suit.
“We must do better,” Monica said.
I remember Jared laughing. I remember him saying, “Peace out, psycho chick,” and Monica answering, “Peace out, Neandertool.”
I also remember how quickly he left.
Then Monica got the rolling ladder from shop, and down we came.
“Welp,” she’d said, “back to class. Everybody be good.”
And back she’d moseyed, saw and all, into the classroom. Just like that famous painting Athena Returning to Wood Shop After Battle.
“That girl,” Rafty said, “is a legend,” and for once, he wasn’t spinning.
She wasn’t done, either.
Later, after school that day, Monica found me, and we went surfing at BoB. It was…medicinal. That was the first time I got a glimpse of what Monica saw in the water, why she trusted it even though it cared nothing for her or for anyone, even though it was too big to care. She trusted it because it was too big to care. That’s what made it dependable.
I was not quite twelve. She’d just turned thirteen. I’d tried surfing before, hadn’t even managed to plant my feet on the board. I was always pretty sure the waves would kill me. Seemed a simple matter of scale. And they weren’t ankle biters that day. Something had stirred them, something big and far off.
“This is where the storm waves come to die,” Monica said, “and I’m the undertaker.” Before I could properly assess the badassery of that remark, she was a
lready teaching: “You’re gonna draw a line from here”—straddling her board, she pointed to the tip of a shorter, blunter jetty—“to there”—a jut of beach inside the cove—“and that’s the magic line where this wave and this wave agree. That’s the pit, the pocket. I call it the fold. That’s all you’ve got. Place like this, the waves are never gonna be corduroy, nothing’s ever gonna be smooth. We didn’t choose that beach. We chose this one. The fold is narrow some days and fatter others, but it’s always there. You gotta trust the water.” She rose on her board, those Raggedy Ann patches on her Goodwill wet suit gleaming like medals of honor.
I stood up, too stiff.
Wiped out. A cross wave took my legs out from under me like a broadsword, and when my knees met the reef finger, I felt the sting of the cold salt letting me know that there was blood, that the teeth of the break had nicked me through the suit.
Monica wanted me to try again. Monica said:
“Trust the water.”
It was the first time I’d managed to stand up on a board.
I felt eleven feet tall.
“See?” said Monica.
After that, we surfed once a week, every week, usually while Drew was at practice. We went to the water, and the water took it all, all the dirt and shit and blood of land life. Next to the ocean, it was nothing.
A baptism. I’d been saved. It wouldn’t be the last time.
Jared Zigler, I think, was cursed after that day, the day of the circular saw. His bully career peaked in seventh grade, and he began his slide from popular meathead to pudgy stoner joke. People called him Jazzy now, I think because he’d tried, for about a week, to get his friends to call him Jay-Z, and this had backfired spectacularly. He’d fallen from grace, if you can call Peak Bullydom “grace,” but he was still useful to the Keseberg social machine. His parents owned this huge mansion on the beach, and they liked to fly to Vegas every weekend because apparently they had too much money and some of it needed to be vented into the cold vacuum of Nevada, for safety’s sake. So every weekend, some party or another—the ones that lost their original venues or never had any in the first place—would find its way up Jazzy’s driveway. People called his house the Party Toilet, because every floater ended up there.
Jazzy was a tool, perhaps a Neandertool, but at least he still existed. The same couldn’t be said for yours truly. I existed only at BoB.
By eighth grade, thanks to Monica’s mama-bearing, the bullying had ceased—and I was grateful, so disgustingly grateful. But the world was starting to get “civilized” as high school set in, and I was starting to fade away. In other words: I was safe, but safely invisible. I spent about a year enjoying not being bullied. And then? Part of me, a weird part of me, started missing it. When you’re bullied, at least you know you’re there. Solid enough to take a punch.
Species usually don’t disappear overnight. Evolution is supposed to be gradual, so gradual a creature doesn’t actually notice he’s being eliminated. Evolution is supposed to be courteous that way.
That courtesy was not extended to me.
I had this stack of old zoology textbooks, castoffs from the zoo library. There was one that was nothing but extinct species. I marked the page for Malpaisomys insularis, the lava mouse, which was a pretty unremarkable mouse, except for the fact that it lived in volcanic rifts in the Canary Islands. But volcanoes aren’t what killed it off. People did. People kill everything. People are hungry. That’s not the mystery.
The mystery is why the lava mouse was so small. There’s something called island gigantism, see. When a smallish species gets thrashed off the mainland by a storm or something and washes up on an island, clinging to driftwood, it starts to change, over the generations. On the island, in isolation, without its usual predators, it starts to evolve a larger and larger body, until it’s a shit ton bigger than its mainland cousins. Theoretically, given proper time and conditions, a mouse species on the right island could end up the size of an elephant. But the lava mouse stayed small. Like it knew what was coming. Like it figured, Why bother?
Under the entry for Malpaisomys insularis, there was a diagram of what the mouse might’ve looked like, reconstructed from fossil remains, along with a little note that said Figure Not Drawn to Scale.
Well: that was my whole life. Figure not drawn to scale.
I was a lava mouse on my own lonely island, clinging to a volcano that could erupt any second, and that volcano was my deep and unscientific love for the fierce and fearless and unflappable yet always earflapped Monica Alegria Bailarín. It was a massive love that was, absurdly, headquartered in a ridiculously tiny body.
Monica was many things. And one of them was tall. Almost a foot taller than I was. Almost a foot taller.
That’s practically a species difference.
I’d watched the girl I loved leave me—in not-so-slow motion—on an evolutionary level. At twelve, Monica was five foot seven. Within a year, she was five eight…five nine…headed for five ten. I watched her go, and I watched Drew go. I was ground control watching them head spaceward. Pretty soon, she was tall in my dreams, too—but Dream Me stayed the same size. I couldn’t even dream big. The most basic cliché: failed. When even your dreams are drawn to scale? It’s a bad sign. That’s why I had to risk this one teeny, tiny betrayal. A minorly shitty thing for a majorly noble goal: Lava Mouse, on his way to extinction or explosion or whatever awaited him, just wanted love to conquer all. Just once. Just this one little grease fire of a miracle. That’s all.
At age sixteen, I desperately needed my life as I knew it to explode. And I needed the flaming debris from that explosion to fall to earth just so, in the shape of a heart. And then everything would be fine. Cue strings. Roll credits.
It wasn’t my most scientific theory.
I got the exploding part right, at least.
MAGIC MIKE WAS balding prematurely. Nobody could figure it out.
I had my theories. But I suspect they were tainted by bias. It’s why I hesitated to publish. That, and my complete lack of qualifications.
I shoveled gorilla feces and watched Magic Mike pace his studio apartment, a flattish boulder on the far side of the habitat that Jollof hadn’t deigned worthy of pissing on. Mike was a comedian whose day job was Victim, with a sideline as Punching Bag. He didn’t mix too much. Spent a lot of time in his apartment. Paced a lot. Waved his arms around. Hooted softly, almost to himself. I said, He’s working on his material. The primate behaviorists said, This is something to keep an eye on.
My theory? Magic Mike was in love with Blue. It was obvious. Dude wasn’t subtle. He watched her from his rock for hours, turning away only when Jollof was “romancing” her. He brought her things. And Magic Mike had nothing. He barely even had produce. Jollof bogarted the best stuff. But what was left over? Magic Mike brought it to Blue, laid yesterday’s vegetables at her feet like a dozen long-stemmed roses.
Blue was older, wiser, and Mike loved Blue—
—yes, nerds, Biology Boy is well aware he’s anthropomorphizing, bringing his own speciesist idiom to an animal’s Umwelt, so report me to the ethologists, why don’t you?—
—and Magic Mike had absolutely nowhere to go with that love. Jollof didn’t field a lot of challenges to his rule. A full-on play for dominance, a rush for the throne—that’s rare in captive gorilla troops. You’re more likely to end up with a solitary male, a guy like Mike, who doesn’t have the status, brawn, or coping skills to deal with his conspecifics.
Especially if the biggest, shittiest conspecific has demonstrated an interest in killing anyone who eats his fruit or so much as looks sideways at his harem.
Some of those solitary males? Go nuts.
Seriously. They can self-harm. It can be ugly.
Now, I didn’t think Mike had a secret cigar box full of razors. But I did think he was pulling out his hair. And there was nothing we
could do about it. There was no higher power that could reorder ape society around a nicer set of rules.
Mike was a nice guy. Good to Blue. Good to me. Good to everybody. Quick to make himself the butt of his own jokes. His pratfalls were legend. They made the keepers laugh. I think they even made Jollof laugh, which was the point. (The point of all comedy, and most sleight-of-hand magic, is to help the weak survive the dictatorship of the strong.) But the Lowlands just isn’t all that nice to nice guys.
Was Mike nice because that was his nature? Or because that was his context? Because he was born small, into a silverback’s big, badass world? I thought about this sort of thing a lot on afternoons when I put in my ape hours between the end of school and the opening tip of Harps vs. Harpmeat.
“How’s our boy?” Brian was beside me, tapping his Ketch-All restraint pole against his boot.
“Not good.”
“What’s your scientific opinion?”
I shrugged. “Sad. Lonely. In love. Balding.”
“Sounds about right.” Brian checked his watch. “Give your old man a ride to the game?”
* * *
—
“I’m worried about Number 19,” said Brian. “He’s a different animal.”
It’d been a surprisingly rough night for the JV Harps. They were down nine at the half, and Brian and I sat on the Keseberg side—a little subdued that night—trying to figure out what was going wrong. There’d been few occasions for Harps fans to spring to their feet, which meant I’d actually gotten to see a decent portion of the game. (Even a sitting crowd, though, meant a lot of partial views for yours truly: I’d mastered the art of watching basketball between lolling heads, through wispy scrims of hair.)
Word was getting around about Drew, I guess, and other squads were finally devising anti-Drew measures: double teams, hard fouls, anything to jam him up. And here in the final hour, St. Augustine looked like it might’ve found a way: Number 19, a quick little combo guard (by little, I mean five eight or so) who’d nabbed a steal off Drew in the first quarter and taken it down for a three, and that was just the appetizer. This kid was hitting, he was fast, and he was a demon rebounder for a short stack, winning way more than his share of fifty-fifties. His hands were a blur.