by Matt Burns
“Huh,” said Will, sniffing his armpits. “I have no smell.”
Mom pulled up into Luke’s driveway with Kate in the front seat. “Mom and I are going to CVS together,” she said. “After we drop you off.”
“Okay.”
“Do you want to know why you can’t come?”
“I don’t want to go to the store, so I don’t really care.”
“Kevin,” said Mom. “Be positive.”
“Well, the reason you can’t go,” said Kate, “is because it’s for woman things.”
I leaned my head back and closed my eyes until I was home.
It was Saturday, so Dad was in his office paying bills. His office is his fortress of solitude. He holes himself away in there for hours. I’m not sure what he does, exactly. I guess he keeps our family’s finances in order while at the same time avoiding having to go browse the latest tampon styles with Mom and Kate. A win-win.
I got in the shower and shampooed and body-washed three times to get Luke’s basement off me. Then I took my morning Accutane pill and washed my face with the white benzoyl peroxide scrub. It was the end of the bottle, so it took a lot of shaking and squeezing to get it out, and when I finally did, it exploded all over my hand and some of it shot behind me onto the wall. I wiped the goopy white stuff up with my blue towel. Then I put on the moisturizer with SPF and patted dry. Always pat dry. My dermatologist had hammered that into my head since my first appointment. Apparently wiping your face with a washcloth will destroy the last century of progress in the field of dermatology. Dr. Sharp would slap me across the mouth if she caught me wiping my face dry. If, on the same day, my dentist found out I only floss the night before my biannual cleanings, I swear to god the two of them would hop tandem on a motorcycle, drive over to my house in the middle of the night, and murder me in my sleep. So I patted dry.
Luke sent me a text saying he and Will were playing football with some kids in his neighborhood and I should come back to play. I told him I had stuff I needed to do at home.
I got out my agenda and looked through all the school assignments I’d gotten the first week and made a chart of when I’d get everything done. I divided the pages in a book about World War I by the number of days before the test and set a consistent schedule. There was a packet for chemistry due next week that looked pretty short, so I scheduled that early to get it over with. And then I listed our horror movie as an ongoing task that I should be thinking about every day.
I sat back to look over the finished assignment grid and was happy. I’d made my own megasyllabus for the rest of the semester. Everything in order, everything with a date and a place.
The only problem was I didn’t feel like actually doing any of the assignments. Making the plan for the assignments was much more satisfying than reading thirty-one pages about the funeral of Edward VII. Instead, I got up from my desk, dug through my closet to pull out the worn pages of printed-out pornography I’d gathered and hid like they were religious texts, and jerked off.
Staring at a worksheet of quadratic equations or a history chapter on the Boxer Rebellion is so dull that my brain runs in the opposite direction. I wonder if teachers realize what they’re doing when handing bland assignments to hormonal monsters, that the chemistry worksheet about catalysts is itself just a catalyst for a viewing of graphic pornography.
And then just as quickly as the obscene thoughts and images rush into my head — the instant the four minutes of magic are over — I forget about them. The urge to look at porn is no different from craving a Pop-Tart: it hits out of nowhere, and even though you know it’s artificial and not good for you, you give in and then the craving’s gone. All the urges and dirty thoughts disappear when I flush the tissue. Actually, while I’m walking over to the toilet, I’ve usually already moved on and am thinking about dinner, what’s on TV, or that the Boxer Rebellion actually is kind of interesting.
I try to not feel too much like a disgusting beast just because I occasionally allow myself to experience the greatest physical sensation available to humans in the most efficient way. Look, if Pop-Tarts had no calories and only made you feel morally repugnant for a few seconds after you finished, you’d eat one every day, too. Four when your parents are out of town.
I flushed the evidence, then meticulously put my sheets and pillow back in place like I was covering up my tracks after pulling off a museum heist. If my pillow had moved even half an inch from where it last was, I worried my parents would notice and start shrieking that I was a no-good, rotten self-stroker.
Dad knocked on my door, and I was still feeling so guilty and paranoid that it scared the shit out of me. He asked me if I had any trash he could pick up. I said yeah and he came in and asked how the schoolwork was going and I told him it was fine. He had a big trash bag with him, and he dumped my bathroom garbage bin into it. About a dozen tissues fell out. It looked like smoking-gun proof that I was addicted to beating off. I swear, though, they were from blowing my nose. When I masturbate, I flush the tissues like a gentleman.
Then he pointed to my towel, which was covered in white stains from the benzoyl peroxide cream I’d wiped up earlier. The wall still sported streaks of white goo, too. Yikes. It looked like I’d been doing butt-naked somersaults while cranking off in there for nine hours.
I stared into my notebook and told Dad the towel could use a wash. I flicked my eyes up and saw him carefully pick the towel up by one corner, facial expression neutral. He kept his eyes on the carpet when he wished me luck with the rest of my homework and left, shutting the door behind him.
Why do mothers and daughters get to bond over “woman stuff” while guys have to avoid eye contact over a stained towel? I mean, don’t get me wrong: I’d rather slice my own head off with a rusty machete than have to deal with a period every month. And if blood ever came out of my penis for any reason, I don’t think I’d scream with joy and write my pen pal a letter about it and rush off to the bathroom with six other boys to celebrate with red velvet cupcakes or whatever pastries the traditional customs might require.
Guys start to have weird bodily emissions around the same time girls get their periods, but we don’t really get to romanticize some moment of “becoming a man.” Dad and I never had a magic moment when I walked into his office, erection flipped up into my waistband, and proudly announced, “Father, it finally happened. I watched pornography and pleasured myself like an animal. I am a man now. Can you please drive me to CVS and recommend the best tissues for cleaning myself up while telling me that it’s perfectly natural and everything is going to be okay?”
It’s probably because girls don’t get to choose when they get their periods, and then it happens naturally every month. Guys have to decide to peel down our running shorts, curl over like a hunchback under a bridge, whack off under cover of darkness, and then flush the evidence down the toilet. A girl’s period is a flower blossoming in the springtime, but a guy’s masturbation session is like a crime.
Perhaps they’re not so similar after all.
Mom and Kate came back bearing boxes of feminine products I didn’t want to look at, along with chicken fingers and mashed potatoes from the grocery store. I made a plate of food and took it back upstairs to eat at my desk, facing my TV. I pulled the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind DVD out of my backpack and put it on. The movie was emotional and romantic and sad, with this good music I’d never heard before and this crazy, smart, interesting structure. If we were going to have any hope of getting our movie into Mr. Meyer’s film festival, our horror movie would need a unique structure like that. It couldn’t just be another formulaic slasher movie.
Alex’s earbuds sat on my bedside table, neatly wound up. I saw myself back in the waiting room, telling her about our movie. She’d be into it. She’d ask questions. She’d love it.
When I shook myself back to reality, I realized the DVD menu had been looping for fourteen minutes.
Mom looked over the form with all the school-photo packages yo
u could buy like she was studying for the SAT. She had three brochures, two order forms, and a dozen sample photos sprawled out on the kitchen island. She said she was buying the super-premium package, which cost 140 dollars and came with enough photos to give four copies to every single person I’ve ever spoken to in my entire life. It was like they were expecting me to get kidnapped and wanted to be prepared to staple my face on all the telephone poles in town.
“We don’t need any copies,” I said. “The picture will go in the yearbook. You don’t have to order anything. Right, Dad?”
Dad turned his head toward me but kept his eyes planted on the newspaper. “Whatever your mother wants.”
“I want to have lots of photos so that someday when I’m an old lady wondering about that high-schooler who lived upstairs in my house and spent all his time locked in his room, I’ll be able to say, ‘Oh, yes, it was Kevin.’” She smiled at me. I squinted at her.
“Come on,” she said. “That was funny. Smile.”
“You really don’t need to waste the money,” I said. “It’s fine.”
She put her hand on my back. “You’ll never have to see them, sweetie. I’ll keep them hidden, all for myself.”
I shrugged and stepped away from her. There were about a million things I could think of that would be a better use of 140 bucks than a bunch of photos that will get dumped in the recycling bin someday when Dad’s on a weekend trash run. But it wasn’t worth the argument.
“What about these options?” she said. “They can do all sorts of stuff to your photo now. Whiten teeth, remove blemishes.”
The blemish removal example showed this kid with a bowl cut from, like, twenty years ago with three big red bumps on his forehead and cheeks like stigmata. In the after-shot his skin looked like a freshly waxed car door.
Mom said, “Do you — would you want that?”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled. It looked strange and false. Isn’t the media evil for Photoshopping celebrity pictures and making all of us have unrealistic ideas of how we should look? Wouldn’t this just be part of that problem? On the other hand, by next spring when the yearbook came out, the Accutane would have cleared up my face and I’d look as smooth as the kid in the after-shot.
“I think you’ll be happy you had it done,” Mom said.
I kind of wanted it. But I was embarrassed to admit I did, so I pretended I was doing Mom a favor by huffing “Fine” and saying she could order it.
I stood in the yearbook picture line with Luke and Will, but they were mostly talking to Sam Hedrick and Patrick Baldwin, two guys they’d, I guess, become friends with at football tryouts. I couldn’t believe Luke and Will had actually followed through on going to tryouts. They forget about 98 percent of the plans they make, but of course they remembered that one.
I’d known Sam and Patrick since fourth grade, but we’d never hung out with them outside of school or anything, so I felt like I’d never actually met them.
Sam has a buzz cut and is built like an ox. His dad has been training him to lift weights since he was an infant. He’s my height but meaty, like a bowling ball made out of muscle.
Patrick has long, messy hair and is the bowling pin, tall and skinny.
They’re always trying to attract attention together. The first time I ever saw someone get detention, it was those two, in Mrs. Yockle’s sixth-grade language arts class, for charging at each other like a bull and a matador during quiet reading time. It wasn’t funny at all. Patrick was the leader of the two. They were sort of like a comedy duo from the 1940s: flapping their limbs while the crowd goes nuts and you have no idea how anyone could find what they’re doing or saying funny.
“Check out this nasty son of a bitch,” said Sam, flicking the top of a whitehead in the crease of his nose. “I saved him up for right now so when I pop him, I’ll be bleeding in the picture. It’s gonna be sick.”
All the other guys laughed, making noises like they were about to throw up. The zit they were so grossed out by looked exactly like any one of the twelve inflamed lumps on my forehead, nose, and jaw. “I’m gonna do it,” he said, laughing. “Ready? Ready? Stand back.”
Luke, Will, and Patrick backed out of the way and shielded their faces while Sam squeezed out the whitehead. It popped a minuscule amount of pus and the other guys all went nuts, hooting like apes. Sam laughed and cheered like he’d won a contest. It was an extremely weak pop, but I wasn’t going to point that out. Considering how nasty they thought Sam’s one pimple was, they must have thought of my face as some hellish nightmare that belonged in a photo of a Great Depression freak show.
“Excuse us,” said Patrick to a few girls who looked at us. “Just taking care of some last-minute blemishes.”
The girls laughed and smiled at him. The whole interaction was disgusting. Patrick is the kind of outgoing, arrogant, slimy jackass who once got away with addressing Mrs. Jones as “Barbara” in front of the entire class.
Luke said, “Did you guys see the retouching thing you can buy? If any guys paid for that, I hope they draw on a set of tits.”
The other guys laughed. I folded up my order form and stuffed it as far down in my pocket as it could go. I stood two steps back from them and didn’t say anything.
I finally got up to the front of the line. My heart pounded in my chest. I brushed my hair to the side and turned away from everyone and dabbed my face with the bottom of my T-shirt to get oil off it. The photographer called my name and I had to sit and smile. In a quarter of a second it was all over. The light was harsh and on top of it there was a flash.
I was glad Mom had paid for the retouching.
Mom called me downstairs that night when I was doing homework in my room. She said she just got off the phone with Mrs. Rossi. Apparently Luke and Will both made the football team.
Goddamn it.
“I didn’t even know you wanted to play football,” she said.
“Right. I don’t. They do.”
“When were tryouts?”
“A few days ago or something. I don’t know.”
“Why didn’t you say anything? You might still be able to get on the team as an alternate if you go to the practices. I can talk to the coach.”
“Please, for god’s sake, do not talk to the coach. I don’t want to play football. And I don’t think Luke and Will seriously want to play football, either. It was, like, a joke or something. I don’t know.”
“Oh. Well, Mrs. Rossi said they have practice just about every day after school now, and on some weekends, too. Are you sure you don’t want to play with them? It might be fun.”
“Sounds like a huge waste of time,” I said. “I have stuff to do that’s, like, actually gonna matter. A project they’re supposed to be doing, too.”
“What is it?”
“We’re making a movie. Like, a real movie. I’m writing it and it could . . . There’s this festival where . . . It’s . . . just . . . a lot more important than whatever they’re doing.”
I went back into my room, shut the door, and tried to work on the script, but I mostly thought about Sam and Patrick’s lame, obnoxious jokes infecting Luke’s and Will’s minds at football practice. They’d traded all their free time for the privilege of running up the bleachers until they puke and developing long-term head injuries via a hundred micro-concussions every day. They’d probably have brain damage by Halloween and wouldn’t be able to contribute much to the movie’s dialogue beyond incoherent mumbling and begging for ice packs on their groins.
I took my pill and spent twenty minutes on my face-washing routine while having this childish daydream about Alex somehow being there again at my blood test the next afternoon. The conversation we’d have played in my head and I locked in the perfect lines to say.
I went through my closet looking for an outfit to wear tomorrow like I was in a silent, lonely version of a teen movie makeover montage. I weeded through thirty dumb T-shirts to find the one button-down shirt I’d gotten for Christmas last year and
had never worn. It was green and made me look older, or at least not so much like a child. I laid it out on my bed beside the least-wrinkled shorts I had. It was a decent outfit. Maybe she’d like it.
Even assuming she was on Accutane, I was taking a leap of faith that she’d be there at the exact same time exactly four weeks after our first appointment. Accutane requires patients to stick to routines, and if ours aligned, it would mean something. Synchronized schedules were a sign from the universe.
I closed my eyes and tried to picture her, but the harder I focused, the less of her I saw. I thought about her one part at a time, her legs or arms or shoulders, but I couldn’t remember the shape or color of anything. All I knew was the impression she left on me. It was like staring into a bright light, then shutting your eyes and seeing the lingering glow stained against the dark. That was what I had of her, an imprint of how she made me feel that was more natural and real than measurements or a photograph.
Somewhere I read that you shouldn’t worry about hypothetical bad things happening, because if they do happen, then you suffered two times. Maybe the opposite was true, too, though. That, as dumb and childish as it feels, you should let yourself hope because if you get lucky and the scene you play out in your head every night before you fell asleep comes true, then you get it twice.
Holy shit.
She was there when I walked in, with her nose tucked inside the pages of a book, looking casual and confident in her messy ponytail. She held a half-eaten granola bar between the fingers of her left hand like a cigarette. I saw the scars on her cheeks, and she had a couple tiny zits on her forehead. She looked perfect. But she had to be on Accutane, right? The chances of her randomly being there at the same time as me again were zero. Unless the office paid her to sit there and attract guys like me into having our blood drawn.