by Matt Burns
Whatever happened, I’d deal with it head-on. And I knew Alex would be around if I needed her, just like I’d be around if she needed me. We were two people who seemed to get each other — maybe better than anyone else could.
The second-to-last week of school, Meyer handed out a worksheet to everyone with just one sentence at the top: “If you could rename the school’s football team, what would it be?” Luke and Will turned their desks toward each other and I stared at the paper by myself for a few minutes, trying to figure out what deep, hidden meaning Meyer thought this meaningless busywork assignment had. Was this a reference to some book no one had heard of? I wondered about what kind of intellectual nonsense he’d want us to write, but nothing came to me.
I got up and dragged my desk over to Luke and Will, and when I sat down, I saw a detailed, grotesque drawing of a man teabagging a cast-iron grill Will had drawn on the paper under the heading “The Sizzling Scrotums.” It was the sort of image that makes you wonder what other people think of your group of friends. How did he draw it so quickly? Was that image stored in his muscle memory? Was that what Will did all day at school?
I laughed at it.
“You’re into this name?” Luke said.
“Definitely,” I said. “I mean, if there’s one unquestionable, slam-dunk name that would unite the student body and get approved by the school board without making anyone uncomfortable, it’s the Sizzling Scrotums.”
The paper asked for an explanation of the suggestion. “Oh, and here, for the explanation part, say . . .” And I took Will’s pen and wrote without thinking, just making dumb stuff up to entertain myself like I had done back when I first started writing: “At the stroke of midnight, an army of students surrounds the football field under spotlights and punishing rain, clutching George Foremans at their crotches. Orange extension cords run up the stadium steps like jungle vines and the grills hiss, a chorus of a million snakes. Angry and determined, we chant: We are no longer bristling, dwindling, middling, sickening. We are thickening, stiffening, and it’s greatness you are witnessing, for our scrotums now and forever shall be sizzling.”
It felt like doing a prank call with them like we used to. It was the only time I’d enjoyed writing in months. I was sure Meyer would immediately send us to the principal’s office. Whatever. It was fun.
“Did you learn that stuff in that writing class thing you took with Alex?” Luke said.
Oh, shit. “No, uh . . . not exactly.” I needed to explain that that whole thing had been a lie. But there never seemed like a good opportunity at school. “I was just kind of making fun of the weird poetry crap Meyer likes.”
Luke laughed. “Oh, yeah. It’s like rap, but worse in every way.”
Will took the paper up to turn in and I cringed, turning my head away from Meyer but glancing out of the corner of my eye to watch him read it. He leaned back. He laughed a few times. Huh.
He came over to our group and said, “Assonance. Words that resemble each other because of their vowel sounds. You wrote this, Kevin?”
I tilted my head up at him. “I, uh, well, I mean it was, like, a group — ”
“It’s disgusting,” he said. “But it’s good to see you’re finding practical ways to apply my lessons.”
“Oh. Uh, thanks.”
Huh. He wasn’t as clueless as I’d thought. He had some level of self-awareness about his own weirdness. Why had I let myself get so annoyed with him? Why had I judged him for volunteering at film festivals and literary magazines? He went out of his way to help people be creative. So what if he worshipped artistic eras he’d never actually known? I spent most of the year fantasizing about girls I barely knew. So what if he loved jazz and nonsense poetry? I loved slasher movies and prank calls about searing my penis on a grill. Everyone’s interests are equally ridiculous, just like he’d told us at the beginning of the year with that pie chart.
Right then I knew what I wanted to do for Meyer’s final project. Plus, it would be the right time to come clean to the guys and apologize for being an asshole all year.
“Hey, you guys wanna come over Saturday night?” I asked as we stood up at the end of class.
They looked surprised, but neither hesitated. Luke said, “All right.”
Will said, “Yeah.”
“Cool,” I said.
“Cool,” Luke said.
“Cool,” Will said.
It felt good to be back.
At the end of the day, we got our yearbooks and I saw the picture of myself with the digitally altered skin Mom paid for. They’d sanded the bumps off my forehead, erased blackheads from my nose, and blended my skin from its red-purple shiny swirl into flat beige. This hollow, lifeless-looking guy who never existed and never would, a shared hallucination between me, Mom, whoever at the picture place retouched it, and everyone else who ever thought it was a good idea for high-schoolers to have professionally Photoshopped yearbook pictures. A collective fantasy of the ideal teenager based on daydreams and movies, not reality: It was like looking at the Doritos Dude.
After Dad and I went to the driving range, I spent Saturday afternoon setting everything up in the basement for the guys to come over. I put on the Blink-182 T-shirt because I realized it was sweet and I’d actually wanted it all along. With the money Mom and Dad gave me for my birthday, I got pizza and soda and cookies and all the other garbage we ate at sleepovers, but I wanted it to seem more important or special, so I put a tablecloth over the pool table and set up three place settings for me, Luke, and Will. But something felt off. I dragged two more chairs over for Sam and Patrick, and I texted them to come over. Then I turned off the overhead lights and put on some lamps, so the lighting was soft and nice. It felt good. Mature and grown-up. Everything was in its place.
The guys barreled through the side door into the basement and stopped in their tracks, staring at the table. “What the hell?” Luke said. “Is this, like, a dinner party? This is unbelievably weird.”
“It’s just us hanging out,” I said, trying to sound casual. “I just wanted to eat at the table instead of the couches.”
“This tablecloth is creeping me the fuck out,” Luke said. “This honestly feels like a trap and you’re gonna murder us.”
Will took a slice of pizza and sat down, and the rest of them apprehensively followed. I sat at the head of the table and badly tried to act casual while sitting just far enough away from everyone to feel extremely uncomfortable. “Have a slice. We’re just hanging out.”
Only Will ate. Luke, Sam, and Patrick stared at me.
“Dude,” Patrick said. “Please tell us what’s going on. You said you had something to tell us?”
“This is so goddamned disturbing,” Luke said.
“Yeah, all right, fine. Fine. Sure. Just, uh . . . Look. I’m sorry I acted like a weird asshole all year.” I looked at Luke and Will. “I guess I got annoyed that you both started playing football and that you were suddenly best friends with these guys.” I nodded at Sam and Patrick. “I felt like a fifth wheel, even though you always tried to include me. But I also felt weird because I had this . . . secret all year.” They all stared at me, waiting for the reveal. “I, uh, I’ve been taking Accutane.”
They all blinked.
“Okay,” Luke said. “And you, like, got cancer from it?”
“No, I just took Accutane.”
“So what’s the secret?” Patrick said.
“What do you mean?”
Luke said, “My brother’s been on it, like, three times. And Alex was on it, right? Why is this a big deal?”
Alex had told him? She wasn’t embarrassed to admit it? Was I the only one turning this into a big deal? Christ. I was pulling a Mom. “I, uh, I just . . . I was, like, embarrassed because . . .”
Sam said, “Will saw your mom drive you to that doctor’s office after school one day, so we figured you had some serious problem and didn’t want to talk about it, so we didn’t ask.”
Patrick said, “Yeah, we
just figured you had, like, Lyme disease or something.”
“No . . . it’s just the, uh, acne medicine.”
Total, unimpressed silence.
Luke said, “This is the worst secret I’ve ever heard.”
I started laughing. They didn’t give a shit and it felt great. “Good. All right, well. Anyway, that’s how I met Alex last year. There was no writing class. She was on Accutane, too, and we met at the place where you get your blood tested.”
“All right,” said Patrick. “Is there any other uninteresting secret you’d like to reveal to us?”
“Yeah,” Luke said. “Want to confess that you ate cereal this morning?”
“You know, what? Sure. Here’s some honesty I should get out in the open: I’ve never done anything with a girl. Never even kissed one.”
“Right,” said Luke. “And you’re not really gonna get any closer to it by hosting formal pizza parties for four dudes.”
“Should we invite girls over tonight?” The idea of hanging out in one group with the guys and girls didn’t terrify me anymore.
Luke thought for a second. “No. This bizarre thing you set up is at least entertaining.”
I had to ask. “Did you guys, when you snuck into the middle school, like, do stuff with girls?”
Will said, “We wrote our names on the wall. I think some girls saw us do it. That’s not that scandalous, though.”
“No, but did you, like, finger-bang anyone?”
“What the hell?” said Luke. “At the middle school? We’d get arrested.”
“Some kid at school said that everyone was finger-banging everyone that night.”
“Nobody finger-banged me,” said Will. “Should I feel left out?”
I laughed. “I heard it was basically an orgy in there, where the entire grade had some sexual awakening and I missed it.”
“No . . .” said Luke. “The only mischievous thing I did in there was fart in Mrs. Garrett’s chair, and that’s not really something that turns girls on.”
Patrick said, “You seriously feel like you missed out on something that night?”
“Yeah.”
“It was honestly, like, one of the lamest things I’ve ever done. We stood around a middle school in the dark. You made a good call ignoring the dumb-ass peer pressure to go.”
“Huh,” I said. “Well, have you guys ever . . . ?”
“Had sex?” said Luke. “No.”
“Only with a sock,” said Will, licking pizza grease off his thumb. “Oh, wait. There was also a Ziploc bag.”
“What about with Emma?” I said to Luke. “I always thought that when you were going out you guys, like . . .”
“We made out a lot. And once I felt one of her boobs through her shirt. But we broke up before I got to the other one. I’m, like, caught in a pickle between first and second base.”
“The five of us masturbate way too much to have anything left over for actual girls,” said Will. “Oh, or guys. Sorry, Sam.”
Sam shrugged, reaching for a slice of pizza. “It’s cool.”
“Wait,” I said, putting my hands on the table. “Wait. What?”
“Wait, were you not there the night I told everyone I’m gay?” he said through a mouthful of cheese.
“What?” I screamed.
“Kevin?” Mom yelled from upstairs. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah!” I shouted, and then, softer, “You’ve all known this? For how long?”
They all shrugged. Luke said, “Yeah, he told us, like, a few months ago. Some night you weren’t there. It was a big deal for, like, a day, but no one gives a shit anymore.”
“Wow,” I gasped. “Wow. Holy smokes.”
Sam said, “I’ll be honest with you, since we’re friends, dude: You’re acting like a huge idiot right now. I’m glad you’re not being a dick, but you’re really sounding like a dumb-ass.”
“Right, yeah. Sorry. I just, uh . . . this is a surprise and it’s cool we can be honest with each other. But yeah, I guess you liking dudes doesn’t actually change anything between us.”
“Nope,” Sam said, stuffing the rest of the crust in his mouth. He turned to Will. “Wait, what about you and Lauren Gordon? Did you do anything after homecoming?”
Will burped. “She invited me to her house once, but when I got there her dad was all sweaty and pissed off at the top of a ladder and he yelled at me to help him clean out their gutters, so I did that for, like, three hours.” He shrugged. “What base is that?”
There was a pause until Patrick said, “I honestly feel like I’m at a six-year-old’s birthday party right now. So before you fucking idiots bring out the musical chairs, I’d like to announce that I got a hand job last spring break.”
“Holy shit,” I said.
“What was it like?” Luke asked.
Patrick said, “It’s pretty much like jerking off, but the hand isn’t yours and it has no idea what it’s doing, so it takes forty-five minutes. And I’d never thought about my dick being sweaty before, but that was mostly what I thought about the whole time.”
I cracked up, feeling this sense of relief. They hadn’t all been drafted into the big leagues of teen sexual encounters yet. Luke had made out with a girl and felt one breast, but that wasn’t nearly as far ahead of me as I thought he’d gotten. Will had only had sex with a sock and a sandwich bag. Was I jealous of Patrick’s hand job? Absolutely. But my moment in the spotlight would come; one day I’d be the chosen one worrying about my sweating penis. I tried to hold back my smile.
We all ate pizza while Patrick detailed the physical ecstasy he’d experienced under a towel between a sand dune and a dumpster at the Myrtle Beach Embassy Suites. It was like hearing a firsthand account of the moon landing.
After the pizza was finished, I cleared my throat and stood up. “Oh, so I didn’t just invite you guys over to tell you about Accutane and apologize for being a jackass.”
“I knew it,” said Luke. “You’re gonna cut our heads off with an ax.”
I smiled. “Maybe. I was thinking . . . do you guys want to, uh, make our movie? For Meyer’s project?”
“You mean that black-and-white French film from the sixties you’ve been writing? Italian Hospital? Antonio Gets His Colon Cleansed? How are we gonna make that in a week?”
“No, let’s make a horror movie,” I said. “I’ve got the title: The Goose-Shit Killer.”
“Does he kill goose shits? Or is he made of goose shit?”
“It’s a guy who falls in a pond on a golf course and when he comes out, he’s, like, half goose shit, and he starts going back in time to kill past versions of himself when he was an idiot.”
“Yeah, all right, sure,” Luke said. “And I’ll be the first guy he kills. I need a weapon. The, uh, Pool Cue Man. That’s our first victim. Let’s go. Let’s start.”
Patrick said, “Sweet, and I’ll be the, uh . . . the . . . the Bread Stick Boy.” He swung two pizza crusts through the air. It looked really dumb. For one, crusts aren’t bread sticks. And they were so small, you’d barely even see them on camera. The Pool Cue Man was already not exactly a groundbreaking idea, and —
Stop.
Who cares? Don’t take it so seriously. Have fun.
“Yeah. Bread Stick Boy. He’s in there. Let’s do it.”
“Why Bread Stick Boy?” Will asked. “Why not a guy named Dick Sweat?”
Patrick shook his head but laughed. Luke sprang off his chair and paced, spewing ideas. “Okay, okay, okay, so we gotta start with the goose guy’s origin. We gotta go out there and Will’s gonna fall into the shit pond.”
Will shrugged and said, “Yeah, all right.”
I took the video camera out of the cabinet. I had no goals or expectations or plans. I would just make the movie. Get lost in it. So what if it fell apart halfway through, or if we lost interest? That was okay as long as we were laughing while we were doing it. The experience mattered more than the product. Most horror films made by sixteen-year-olds suck
and most memories with your friends don’t.
Whatever we made, we’d turn it in to Meyer. If it was unwatchable, then our story would be about how it fell apart. Anything could be a story — that was Meyer’s whole point with this vague assignment.
I set up the camera while Luke and Patrick talked through ways the first scene would work. Patrick went to the bathroom and walked back saying, “That bed in your guest room has the same sheets Sam pissed in.”
“Sweet,” Sam said.
“You pissed in your sheets?” I asked.
The other guys all laughed. “Couple weeks ago,” Sam said. “Had this dream I was standing at a urinal and then I woke up and realized I was mistaken.” He shrugged. “Felt great. You guys are wasting a lot of time walking from your beds to the toilet. I might have to relive the magic with the setup you’ve got in there.”
“We should make him sleep in a bathtub tonight,” Will said. “He’s like a wild animal.”
“Put him outside by the garbage cans,” said Luke. “Let the raccoons piss all over him.”
I asked Sam, “Why do you tell the guys about this stuff when you know they’ll give you shit?”
Sam shrugged. “If I don’t own up to this stuff, you assholes would find out somehow and give me shit anyway. It feels better to take charge of it instead of being crippled with shame and fear like you pussies.”
He made a good point.
“I gotta pee,” I said. “The camera’s ready. Figure out what you’ll say and we’ll go out to the golf course and just start filming.”
I stepped into the bathroom and closed the door behind me. I heard them coming up with lines for Dick Sweat and I smiled.
That Doritos Dude I fantasized about being — the smooth slacker who wakes up at two p.m. on his beanbag chair and is only concerned about scoring some nachos — doesn’t exist. Everyone’s worried. Everyone’s paranoid. Sam acts so confident about his embarrassing moments because he worries we’ll make fun of him if he doesn’t own them first. Patrick wishes he could stand up to peer pressure and he’s nervous about his penis sweat. Luke and Will worry they’ll never do anything with girls, too. If the Doritos Dude did exist, he’d be stressed out about the way his cargo shorts fit or about the other dudes at the skate shop thinking his deck sucks or about the orange dust on his fingertips leaving handprints that ruin his girlfriend’s tank top when they make out.