by Don Zolidis
I sat in the back, watching the door like a dog with its paws over its nose. Then I saw her walk by. I felt my chest cave in when I saw her, as if a moose had kicked me in the ribs and crushed my sternum. Then it break-danced on my flattened body. It didn’t help that there was sunlight streaming into the hall, and it caught her just right, setting her blond hair and fuzzy sweater aglow like an angel.
I stared toward the front of the room, but she was everywhere I looked.
It occurred to me that now we were going to have to pretend we didn’t know each other. We couldn’t make eye contact in the halls. We couldn’t talk to each other on the phone. We had to pretend all of that was a mistake. I guessed it was. It’s funny how someone can go from being your whole world to someone you can’t look at.
“Isn’t that right, Craig?” Mr. Bo had sauntered down the aisle and was looming over me.
“Yes,” I said.
His face darkened. “Really?”
I blinked, not sure what he was talking about.
“Craig?” said Mr. Bo. “You agree with that?”
A hush seemed to be falling over the class. Brian had turned to look at me, shock on his face. “Shut up, dude,” he hissed.
Mr. Bo turned on Brian. “Did you say something, Brian?”
“I don’t think Craig heard the question, sir,” he explained.
“Oh, he heard it. Craig here thinks that the plot to blow up federal buildings in protest of Vietnam was a good idea.”
“I said what?” I said.
I spent most of the day like that. Stumbling around in a zombified daze. I felt like my skull was a cantaloupe that someone had hollowed out with a melon-baller. Everything about me hurt. My neck, my arms, my stomach. All of my muscles were wringing themselves out.
My friends did their best to cheer me up.
“Just think,” said Groash. “In thirty years she probably won’t even be that hot anymore. She might still be kinda hot. She might be dirty. You know what I mean? Like, sometimes older women have done some crazy shit.”
Groash wasn’t very good at it.
“She’s making a big mistake,” said Elizabeth, putting her arm through mine to steady me. “The best thing to do now is just be yourself.”
“What?” said Brian. “That doesn’t make any sense. Be better than yourself. Being yourself is what got you dumped.”
I have to add at this moment that I hadn’t told anyone that Amy had dumped me because she had a boyfriend. Why? In a twisted way, I thought it reflected badly on her, and I didn’t want to hurt her image with my friends. Like I said, I didn’t make a whole lot of sense as a human.
“Live your life,” said Elizabeth. “Be who you are and then girls will like you.”
“Dude,” said Groash. “What the hell are you telling him?”
“I’m giving him good advice.”
“Craig has been himself for a long time,” said Brian. “And it hasn’t worked.”
“Hey,” I blurted.
“Except for this one time,” he said. “And I think we can all agree this was a total anomaly.”
“She went temporarily insane or something,” said Groash. “No, dude. Nobody likes me when I’m myself either. That’s why I’ve got a whole thing where I pretend to be an orphan.”
Somehow I got roped into going to Elizabeth’s house after school. Apparently my friends determined that I was unfit to be left alone, or with my sister.
“I’d be alone with your sister,” said Groash. “I’d be alone with her so much.”
“Please stop.”
Groash had left to go be with some of his skate-punk friends, and his house wasn’t exactly suitable for human habitation anyway. There was no way we were going over to Brian’s house (“No,” he said. “Trust me.”), which left Elizabeth’s house as the only viable alternative.
She and her mom lived close to downtown, in a little duplex. I’d been there exactly once, and it had been a disturbing experience.
The snowstorm had dumped about ten inches of snow on the town, and the wind that whipped up had blown some of it into huge three- or four-foot drifts. It was the kind of day where the little kids went sledding until their noses turned purple. The sidewalks to her house were half-shoveled. Some enterprising citizens had taken their shovels or snowblowers and cleared off part of the sidewalks. Other people, probably the more sensible ones, said screw it and stayed inside.
We’ d walk easily enough for a block or so, and then it was like we were trudging through the ice planet Hoth. Except I had no boots because I was stupid, and my tennis shoes sank in the snow up to my calves. It sucked.
It exactly mirrored how I felt. An icy wasteland, half-cleared.
Elizabeth walked arm in arm with me, as if I needed steadying. I probably did. When we got to an unshoveled section of the sidewalk we’ d struggle through like toddlers in snowsuits.
“Dude,” said Brian. “You don’t need to hold him. He’s not going to fall over.”
“He might fall over,” said Elizabeth.
“Craig,” he said. I looked at him. “You’re not going to fall over, are you?”
“I’m all right,” I said.
“Fine,” said Elizabeth, and she let go of me. “You’re free. Fly, little bird.”
Right next to me was a three-foot snowdrift. I spread my arms wide and fell face-first into it.
My body made a poof sound when I hit the snow. I lay totally still. I wonder how long I can stay here? Ow, this kind of hurts my face. Snow looks like it’s comfortable, but it’s actually cold and prickly. I should’ve worn boots today.
I heard Elizabeth behind me.
“You think he’s dead?”
“Not yet,” said Brian.
I’ll say this about Elizabeth’s house. It was the best-smelling place on earth. It was probably the result of some mysterious incense that was burning somewhere, but the whole house smelled awesome, like if cinnamon and chocolate had a baby or something. It was great. (Actually, the whole house didn’t smell awesome, the half of the house that Elizabeth and her mom occupied smelled great. The rest of the duplex probably smelled like failure.)
Elizabeth’s house was what happened if there was no illusion of adult supervision. There were purple and red tapestries hanging from the walls. There were puzzles of dragons and wizards glued together and framed like paintings. There were about half a dozen fertility statues. And that was the stuff I could identify. The rest of the place was festooned with chimes, pagan symbols, and the occasional Calvin and Hobbes poster.
“This is basically the opposite of my house,” said Brian as he fondled two fertility statues simultaneously.
“That one’s supposed to be a penis,” said Elizabeth.
Brian set it down. Then he stole a glance at it. “I think these statues are giving you unrealistic ideas.”
Elizabeth smirked. “You never know.” She turned to me. “Here’s what we do. We play some video games until our thumbs bleed and listen to the Violent Femmes. Does that sound good?”
“Sure,” I said.
She looked at me like I was a lost puppy. “You’re gonna be okay. I’m gonna get some cider—we don’t have anything else.”
There was a beaded curtain to the kitchen, because of course there was, and before Elizabeth could slide through it to get the cider, her mom appeared.
She was wearing clothes. Thank God it was winter. Elizabeth’s mom was a hippie in the ’60s, and instead of growing up and selling out like the rest of her generation, she had just continued to get weirder with time. Her hair was waist length, with the same curl as Elizabeth’s, except even wilder and thicker. She probably had twenty pounds of hair. She wore a kimono, and more beaded necklaces than a craft fair. Her arms glittered with silvery bangles. Instead of walking, she floated, tinkling and sparkling. She was like an enormous crazy-ass fairy.
“Hey, Mom,” said Elizabeth.
“What’s up?” she said.
“We’re gonna play s
ome vids. Do we have any cider?”
“What do you want cider for?”
“To drink it.”
“Oh. I suppose we have some, then.”
I had collapsed onto what passed for a couch, which was really just a strange collection of giant tufted pillows that contained two or three cats. She looked down at me.
“Billy.”
“Craig.”
“Oh yeah. Craig.” She studied me with a bemused smirk on her face. “I know you.”
“He just got dumped,” added Brian helpfully. “It was brutal.”
“I’m fine,” I lied. “It’s no big deal.”
“He almost died on the way over here. Fell in the snow.” He re-created me face-planting into the snow with his hands.
Elizabeth’s mom put two fingers together in front of her mouth, deep in thought. “Hmm…and now you’re here for my wisdom.”
“Um…actually, no…I don’t need wisdom…. We’re just gonna geek out with some games.”
“He probably needs wisdom,” said Brian, his eyes sparkling. “He’s rudderless actually. Like a lost bird.”
She drew closer. “I think you need coral.”
“I don’t know that a piece of coral is going to solve my problems,” I said.
“Of course not,” she said. “It focuses your mind.”
“Oh.”
“And hones your sexuality. You have to remember that your most important sexual organ is your mind.”
I shifted uncomfortably in the pillow collection, keenly aware of the fertility statues looming over me.
“You have such power in you,” she said, drawing nearer, in a shimmering tinkle of musical bangles. She was like Obi-Wan Kenobi if Obi-Wan was a witch in a duplex. “Can you feel it? All you have to do is find it in your heart…and unleash it. Right now you’re all stopped up.”
“Mom,” said Elizabeth, returning with cider. “Craig didn’t really come over here to receive coral—”
“Shhh.” She waved her away. “This is my gift.” Elizabeth’s mom patted me on the chest. “Pain is a blessing because it means you’re alive. The more love, the more pain. Close your eyes and embrace it. Love it.”
And, strangely enough, I listened to her. I closed my eyes. And there, in my mind, was Amy—the moment we had held hands on the bridge with the lights from the city glittering on the dark river. It felt like an ice pick through the chest.
“And now for you,” she said, turning to Brian. Brian went pale and nearly dropped his glasses.
“Mom, please stop.”
“So much sexual fire in there,” she rumbled. “What makes you sing, little bird?”
“Maybe we should go to my house,” managed Brian.
It was a long walk to Brian’s house. The sun had gone down—in early December the sun sets in Wisconsin shortly after it comes up, like a groundhog seeing its shadow. Plows crackled up and down the streets, occasionally sending an avalanche of dirty snow tumbling in our direction. We walked with our hands buried in the bottoms of our pockets, hunched against the bitter wind. I could’ve really used a hat.
“You tried, right? You tried. That’s cool,” said Brian, shivering.
“And got flattened.”
He shrugged. “But you did it. I mean, you kissed Amy Carlson. Like—are you kidding me? So what if it didn’t work out? You tried something.” He skipped over a drift of snow and darted to the other side of the street.
This probably was the moment I should’ve told him what really happened. Yes, I tried something, but she was actually going out with another guy at the time, so it was an unmitigated disaster.
I crossed the street and Brian’s eyes were far away. “I mean, I give you shit, but I admire that. It took courage. I don’t ever…I don’t know.”
“You don’t ever what?”
“Go for it.”
“Well, if I’m any indication of what happens when you go for it, maybe you’re making the right decision.”
He shook his head and smiled weakly. “No.”
I’d been friends with Brian since the fourth grade, when he was the new kid at my elementary school. There weren’t a lot of Asians in Janesville. There weren’t a lot of anybody except for Germans and Polish people. Brian’s family had escaped the war in Vietnam on boats and arrived in America in 1975, just after he was born.
We’ d been put in a group together—we were supposed to create a skit about advertising something, and I had protested. I’d said, “Americans and Chinese don’t mix.” He’d replied, “I’m Vietnamese.” My teacher was having none of my casual racism and put us together anyway. After that, we found out we had an affinity for monsters, weird science fiction, and comic books.
I thought about that first comment a lot. I’d apologized for it over the years, of course, but it felt like a stain on my soul—like a little racist mushroom growing in the dark cellar of my brain. If I could give my nine-year-old self the benefit of the doubt, maybe I just really wanted to be in a group with someone else and didn’t want to be with the new kid. Maybe I’d heard it from someone else, but still, what a dickish thing to say. It was only the tip of the iceberg for him, though. He was teased relentlessly in school; first for being Vietnamese and then for being a nerd. In seventh grade people had spelled out “go home freak” on his front yard with plastic forks. I had been, in some small way, a part of that.
We walked side by side, which was hard, since some people had scraped a suggestion of a path through the snow rather than clear the whole sidewalk. The headlights of passing cars sent frosty blue shadows dancing around us.
“If I look on the bright side,” I said, “suffering is probably good for me. According to Dostoevsky.” Damn, if only I could’ve written that college essay now.
Brian shook his head. “This is what my mom tells me: You think you know what suffering is? Try riding in the hold of a cargo ship for two weeks with a newborn. Then talk to me about suffering.”
“Yeah, that sounds a little worse than what I’m going through.”
“Gives you some perspective, doesn’t it? They literally tell me that every time I complain about anything. I’m like, ‘I don’t want to do the dishes,’ and my mom’s like, ‘Oh, it’s too difficult for you? You know what’s actually difficult? Breastfeeding you in a refugee camp, that’s what’s difficult.’ So I end up doing the dishes a lot.”
I walked in silence a bit.
“Thanks,” I said.
“You kissed the girl of your dreams, dude,” he said. “Some of us haven’t gotten there yet.”
I felt the chunk of coral in my pocket.
“You know what?” I took it out and handed it to him. “You should have this.”
“It’s not even a gemstone, dude.”
“Yeah.”
He took it anyway.
“Actually, if you want to learn about true suffering, just wait until you go up against the Association of Darkness. That’s gonna take real courage. You have no idea. No idea what’s coming at you.”
That was true in more ways than one.
First of all, there is no sex in this chapter, but there is sex in chapter eighteen. So you can skip to that if you’re only in this for the dirty parts, but, of course, you’ll miss all the very, very crucial context.
My dad did indeed get laid off in December, and by the time March rolled around he still hadn’t found a new job. Things were getting a bit tense, but it was alleviated by the fact that Amy and I had gotten back together. (Okay, we had broken up two more times, but at this point in time, we were together again and all was right and good with the universe.)
We were in the basement on a Saturday night, right before spring break.
“All right, Blutus, your turn,” said Brian, dripping contempt from his protected perch behind the wall of screens. Blutus was the name of Amy’s character, who was a ninth-level fighter that had just joined our adventuring party. Blutus had a giant battle-ax and was pretty incompetent.
Amy loo
ked down at the table like she was trying to read Chinese.
“Okay, so I roll…”
“The twenty,” I said, handing her a twenty-sided die.
She held it like a small grenade and then dropped it on the table.
“Fourteen,” she said, turning to look at her inscrutable character-record sheet. “Do I hit?”
“Well, you hit last time with a twelve, so that would probably be a yes,” said Brian. “Roll damage.”
I handed her two regular D6 (that means a six-sided die, or the standard die that is used in playing Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, and determining if the United States is going to invade somewhere). She dropped them carefully on the table while Groash and Elizabeth looked on in dumbstruck boredom.
There’s a delicate ecology to the nerd society that is Dungeons & Dragons. Like a finely honed machine, it requires that everyone be on the same page. There are, I’m not kidding you, something like eight hundred pages of rules to be digested and memorized. We seriously took the rule books home and read them for fun. Well, at least I did. Elizabeth didn’t really subscribe to this total immersion in geekdom philosophy because she had something resembling a life.
But Brian, Groash, and I were total lifers. We’ d played since elementary school. I had gotten hooked when my dad accidentally bought a Basic D&D set in third grade for Christmas, and Groash had shoplifted tons of stuff because his mom had no money. Brian’s parents were not exactly enthralled with the prospect of their firstborn son spending his time battling monsters and dragons in a fanciful imaginary world, but somehow he had convinced them that it would look amazing on college applications. Brian was great at bullshit.
Anyway, we were a finely tuned geek machine. And Amy was destroying it in every way imaginable.
“Okay, seven,” she said.
“Add your bonuses,” I said, trying not to talk to her like she was a toddler.
Amy looked at the arcane list of numbers snaking up and down the papers. This was harder than calculus. “Okay, so let’s see, plus four and plus nine and plus…”
Brian snapped. “It’s not that hard! You have a magical weapon bonus, a strength bonus, a specialization bonus, and a preferred enemy bonus—plus seventeen. You do twenty-four points of damage!”