by Jill Malone
We take the ball from them and score off a corner. And then the sweeper takes a swing at me with her stick, and gets carded. After I score off the penalty, I start getting shoulders and sticks from all of them. Just before the half, they take me down. Three of them, I think, but mostly I’m practicing tuck and roll. Before I’m up, I hear Renee and Kelly, and get to my feet grinning. My team is kicking some Long Branch ass in a plaid-skirted brawl.
We go out for subs, and then to Carvels after for ice-cream sandwiches. Dad, still in his uniform, arrived just in time to see the fight. He stood on the sidelines shaking his head.
“Are all your games like that?” Meghan asks. She’s eating cookies and cream like she doesn’t know cookies and cream is completely gross.
“Someone always tries to cripple Cole,” Nigel says. He never misses any of my games. The other girls love him. Kelly calls the house sometimes just to talk to him. “Even Ocean, and they suck.”
“Don’t say suck,” Mom says automatically. She hands us bottled waters.
“Man,” Meghan says, “and I thought rugby was fierce.”
Indefatigable. Hard to figure. (And ugly to pronounce.) Jeremy is indefatigable about dating.
We have Graphic Arts after homeroom. Kelly and Leisha and I trek from one end of school to the other, and occasionally make it before the bell rings. This corridor houses the photography studio, printing presses, and shop, and reeks of chemicals, dye, and metal shavings. None of the windows open, and the fans are just fancy holes. This morning Kelly has a cut to the right of her eye, and two of her fingers are taped. She and Renee and three Long Branch girls were red-carded.
“Today,” Mr. Pang tells us, “we’re going to pair up and take photos around campus.”
Mr. Pang’s hair parts exactly down the middle; his nails are long and, yes, I think it’s true, manicured. He has a wispy, hint of a mustache, and this great chuckle laugh that he throws around all the time like we’re the most amusing people he has ever met.
Now he calls random pairings and gives each couple a 35mm camera and a hall pass. I get paired with Bangs. Kelly gets the senior with the droopy eye.
Bangs hands me the camera, and stalks beside me. He is much bigger when you’re close to him. We walk into the quad, and down one of the side paths toward the baseball field. It’s October, sunny, but my jacket feels good. He’s bare armed.
With the camera rested against my thigh, I pause and look around the field. It’s empty out here: just grass and dirt and diamond. Beside me, Bangs slouches, kicks at the grass with his Vans.
I point to the cyclone fence behind home. “Want to climb?” He stares at me, before he walks to the fence. I don’t see him move and then he’s halfway up, scaling like a Ranger.
“Wait,” I call. I run to the other side of the fence, and wish I had nerve enough to ask him to hang upside down. Instead, I climb onto the dugout and from this angle catch Bangs on the fence, as well as the line to first base. He tosses his bangs back, and I get aspects of these tosses—flicks of his mane. The light is low and clear and I can see the mole on his cheek.
I shoot half the roll—him on the fence, and running the bases, and sitting cross-legged on the pitcher’s mound—before I pass the camera to him. Through the viewfinder, he scours the landscape, and then says, still looking through the camera, “I saw your game yesterday.”
I don’t know what to say, or even if it’s true, but I turn toward him, listening.
“Wish I’d got some photos of that,” he says. He lowers the camera, grins at me.
We have eight classes at Monmouth, but only seven a day, so every day you drop a different class. Today we drop Geometry, and I climb the stairs to English after Graphic Arts to wait in the hallway with Kate and Alicia. Ms. Overhead locks the door between classes so she can masturbate without interruption.
Jeremy waves from across the hall, and then comes over to us. “Hi there,” he says to Alicia and Kate.
They smile at him.
“Walk me to class?” he asks me. He has European History now, two classrooms from mine.
I step away with him, and he leans in quickly to kiss me, pressing a folded note into the front pocket of my jeans. “I heard they tried to stampede you yesterday.”
I wonder where he heard about it, and how accurate the telling was.
“Five goals?” he grins.
I nod.
“Wish I’d been there.”
Jeremy is black-haired, with dark blue eyes, and pale skin. He’s broad shouldered and taller than I am, but he isn’t greedy about space. It’s easy to stand with him like this in the hallway. Can I read the letter now, or should I wait? I’m still trying to decide when the bell rings.
After Ms. Overhead picks readers for the fourth act of Hamlet, and doesn’t choose me, I unfold Jeremy’s letter.
Dear Cole:
About Saturday night in the car. I really want to be with you, but I don’t want to miss the trip either. I talked to Mike, and he said, we just get this one opportunity and we should savor it. That’s what he said: savor it. You know Mike. I hope it’s all right that I talked to him about it. I just thought I needed some guidance. When I’m around you, I don’t always think straight.
Want a ride home after practice?
Jeremy
OK, the thing I told Meghan about Jeremy and oral, not entirely accurate. The truth is, I asked Jeremy to. Begged. Cajoled. Pressured. I’m tired of being this girl. Me. I’m tired of being me. For a little while, I want to be someone else. Another kind of girl: a little less in my head, a little more in my body. Present. I want to be present.
Mike, Jeremy’s older brother, is a sophomore at Penn State. Their dad made them come home for Evening Prayer. He forbade Halloween, sleepovers, PG-13 movies, television. In high school, Mike fronted a metal band, and his parents threatened to send him to a therapist. Before Jeremy, Mike used to make me mixed Cure tapes. He kissed me once, late on a Sunday night at the parade ground. I don’t even remember why I was outdoors, but I saw him at the war memorial and he called to me. Savor. Yes, I want to be savored. Devoured and consumed.
Ms. Overhead says my name. I look up.
“Well, Cole?” she says. “What’s your position on Hamlet?”
“He’s a jackass.”
The class turns toward me, awake all at once. Alicia has her hand over her mouth.
“Care to expound on that?” Ms. Overhead says.
“What kind of guy doesn’t look behind a curtain before he stabs someone? And he’s so mean to Ophelia. Ophelia’s pretty unrealistic—I mean, why is she mad, exactly—but that’s no reason to ignore her, and speak in code like a jackass. So her father manipulated her, his did too. Hamlet is a wishy-washy brat.”
I don’t want to see Jeremy anymore. The bell rings and I leave before anyone can say anything.
We practice until 6. Drills mostly, and sprints. Today, Coach makes me do half the sprints, and then sends me to jog around the field for the rest of practice.
Bangs is propped beside the gym door, holding his board by a truck as though it were a briefcase. I pause in front of him, and he scoops his hair behind his ear.
“Your number,” he says. “I need it, to call you.”
He copies it down on the title page of our Biology text. In Sharpie.
Turns out indefatigable means tireless. That’s not what I thought, and kind of disappointing. Doesn’t it sound like it should mean hard to figure? My father is indefatigable about my salvation. Well, everybody’s, but his stance on mine is particularly relevant to me. No offense.
At night, usually around ten, Dad goes for a walk through the neighborhoods. He says during night walks his mind wanders and comes back sleepy. Sometimes I go with him. In fact, when we moved here, and were still living in temporary housing, we walked through this very neighborhood, and Dad said it looked like a ghetto. The houses are all three-story brick duplexes, but instead of being divided down the middle, they’re divided by floor. On
e family gets the ground floor, and a maid’s room; the other family gets the second floor and a maid’s room. In every backyard, metal trashcans, and laundry lines.
I don’t think Dad’s happy here. His stepfather and aunt died two years ago, and afterward his mother had a nervous breakdown, and still calls late at night crying, and his current job is administrative, and he suddenly has three alien teenagers living in the house with him. And Nate got caught with a girl in his room in August. Later, when I’m thirty and have a kid of my own, I’ll have more sympathy for my father during this assignment, but right now I’m fifteen and I think he’s a dick who’s having an affair with his secretary. It’s the way he says her name: Miss Jensen, like it’s whipped cream.
Tonight, he calls on the intercom to ask if I want to walk with him. (I live in the maid’s room on the third floor and have my own bathroom—Nate’s punishment for getting caught with a girl was to swap rooms with me.) Bangs hasn’t called yet, but waiting is lame, so I agree. Dad tells me to wear a hat.
And he’s right; the wind is indefatigable through the streets, and our clothes. The yards smell like mucky leaves and have toys and bikes and skateboards tossed on them because no one worries about thieves. And I want my mind to wander down the alleyway, and out the gate and through civilian streets, and come back braver. I think of Jeremy in the car on the drive home after practice, chattering away like it’s not over, like he doesn’t know.
“How’s Leroy?” Dad asks.
Leroy teaches me guitar. He’s an old black guy with one of his front teeth missing, and he plays blues like you’ve never heard. This one song Walking the Dog, well, you can’t breathe when he plays it. Dad’s asking because he can hear me playing even from two floors below, and guitar is a safe subject for both of us.
“He thinks I’m not practicing my scales enough.”
Dad winks at me, and we keep walking. Of course I don’t practice my scales enough. I don’t practice anything enough.
We pass the metal bus stop, painted white now to cover the graffiti where Kiki Stewart and I wrote the names of every couple we knew with black marker. This is our last year in Jersey. Dad knows it’ll be Alaska or Hawaii for his final assignment, and we’d all prefer Alaska. We should know in the spring where we’re going.
I played Leroy one of my songs at our last lesson. He kept his eyes closed while I sang, and when I finished, he asked me to play it again. I’d never played for anybody before. It felt kind of sacred.
The Barnes’ dog is baying. The lights are on in every room of the General’s quarters. He has a really ugly daughter. She’s the same year as Nate, and has a crush on him. Pepper is tugging against my dad. Partly I’m eager like that. Like Pepper. I want to pull against everything. I want to strain. I think maybe I do.
Resilient. I love this word. It’s reptilian! Resilient means recovers readily; buoyant. Adjective.
Sunday afternoon, Meghan and I go over the vocabulary list at the dining table after lunch. Mom and Dad are napping, and the boys are playing Sega.
“Where are you?” she asks.
“What?”
“Where are you? You’re not here. Not at this table, in this room.”
“I played some of my songs for Leroy. He thinks they’re good.”
“What songs?”
“You know, for the guitar.”
“You write songs?” She says this like I’ve admitted eating babies.
“Yeah.”
“Will you play one for me?”
I can’t decide if she’s teasing me. So I shrug.
“Will you?” she insists.
“If you want,” I say, and shrug again. Ophelia bugs me. She went crazy all of a sudden, didn’t she? Boys. Jeremy came over last night and we watched a video—he loves Hitchcock, so we watched Spellbound. Gregory Peck is gorgeous. In the movie, he’s crazy in that hard to understand way that Ophelia is. Like convenient-to-the-plot kind of crazy. Before he left, Jeremy kissed me in the kitchen. He grabbed my shoulders and kissed me hard, and when he let me go I felt like I was filled with helium.
“Now?” Meghan asks.
“What?”
“Will you play a song for me now?”
“My guitar is upstairs,” I say.
She stands, and I do too. I still don’t know if she’s teasing me, but I lead her upstairs, and unlock the door to my room and then we stand there just inside. She’s never been in here before, I’m pretty sure. She sits on the bed and looks at me.
“I’m ready,” she says.
I get my guitar and sit on the floor and tune it. By the second verse, I’m OK. I just don’t look at her, keep my head down, and sing. When I finish I wipe my hands on my jeans.
“You wrote that?”
I look up now and she isn’t teasing me. I nod.
“Do you have more?”
I play another. And another after that. I don’t know how long we’re up there, but I play and play and it stops feeling weird that I’m not alone. When I look at her, at last, her face is tense. Only for a moment, though, and then she grins at me.
“You’re a surprising person, Cole.”
“Am I?”
“Yes.”
I want to ask why she looked tense, but I don’t know how, and she’s been so nice about everything that I grin back at her like I’m not worried. “You know Hamlet?” I ask.
She nods, still grinning.
“What’s the deal with Ophelia? I don’t get it. Her arc and everything.”
“She loses everyone she loves all at once.”
“Well, it does sound kind of harsh when you say it like that.”
“Let’s go for a walk,” she says, helping me to my feet. “I’m wild to be doing something.”
I follow her down the stairs and on the last staircase, she stops, turns in front of me so abruptly that I nearly slam into her, and says, “Thank you for playing for me.”
“Sure.” And there it is again. I’m entirely helium.
I babysit for the Thorns a lot of Sunday and Tuesday nights. Usually the kids are already in pajamas, and I just play with them for a while, read stories, and then put them to bed. Afterward, I finish my homework or watch MTV or whatever until the Thorns get back around ten. Tonight Karen wakes up crying. She and Annie sleep in the same room, so I get her and bring her into the living room with me. Karen is ten months old with a big, almost hairless head and huge brown eyes; she’s the happiest kid I’ve ever met. She’d rather be laughing than anything else.
I sit on the couch with her and she looks at me for a while, then she rests her head on my chest and falls asleep. No kid ever slept on my chest before. It’s kind of amazing to hear her breathe and feel her heart and the weight of her. I don’t move for a long time. When the ginger cat comes and sits on my leg, her purring synchs with Karen’s and they both hum against me. Exponentially more interesting than Geometry theorems.
When I get home, I stop in the kitchen for some water and find a note that Christian called. By the time I get upstairs, and ready for bed and everything, it’s nearly eleven, but Christian has his own line in his room, so I call anyway.
“It’s Cole,” I say.
“Hey.”
It doesn’t sound like Christian. The voice is raspy.
“I hope it’s not too late to call. I just got back from the Thorns.”
“Who are the Thorns?”
Now I know it isn’t Christian. “I babysit for them.”
“Oh.”
“What are you doing?” I still have no idea who this is, but he’s talking like he knows me, and I can figure this out if he keeps going.
“I skated all day at Hand’s place. Now I’m playing guitar and talking to you.”
It’s Bangs. I forgot he had a real name. “What kind of guitar?”
“A Gibson electric. I just got a wah pedal.”
“What do you play?”
“You know, whatever. I can play some Metallica.”
“Who’s Hand?�
� I ask.
“Oh,” he says. I can hear the wah pedal cry. I want to see his guitar, the way he holds it. “We call him Mr. Hand, but that’s not really his name. He has a skate shop in Asbury Park—it’s this crazy warehouse, and he built some ramps in the back. Pretty sonic.”
“Mr. Hand?”
“Yeah, it’s about this bumper sticker on his car. I’d rather be masturbating.”
I blush. I feel it. And I realize he was stalling, trying not to tell me.
“Is that guy your boyfriend?” he asks.
“What guy?”
“The one with the black hair. The football player.”
“I don’t know.”
“He seems like your boyfriend.”
I don’t know what to say. His guitar cries in one long wail, and we both listen.
Every week, Meghan designs thirty-word vocabulary lists; I define each word, give parts of speech in my answer, and we go over the whole thing together. If I do five a day, I get a day off every week. Inimitable. It means matchless. We’re going to be inimitable against Freehold this afternoon. We have three more games left this season; our last is the day before Halloween.
My parents bought Nate a Toyota this summer, and they pay for his insurance since he drives Nigel and me to school every day. We pick Doug up too, and the four of us in Nate’s hatchback are snug with our school bags and my field hockey gear. Doug and Nate play soccer in the spring, and the rest of the year they smoke pot and talk about brewing their own beer and try to convince girls they’re different from other guys.
“Hey, Cole,” Doug says after he adjusts the radio to more bass than the car can take, until the windows rattle. “Did you get Allison’s number for me?”
“I told you. She has a boyfriend.”