“Where’d you take that?” I say.
“New York City,” he says.
Everything is normal again. We’re talking about his pictures. He’s not angry with me.
I feel confused. He’s Neil again, but who was that? What happened? “What happened?” I say.
He sets the photographs on the bed and looks at me, hands on his hips. He smiles. “That was called sex. You think you’re gay? That’s what gay men do.”
His eyes do this little flashing thing. It’s like we’re kids at school both running for the swing at recess and he gets there first, sits on it and looks at me. It’s that kind of look. Beat ya to it!
“Get dressed,” he says, tossing my jeans at me. “I gotta drive you back.”
He goes over to the chest of drawers to get a cigarette. His back is to me. His bumpy spine showing through his skin. If I run, I think, I could dive into him with my hands, aim for that spine, maybe snap it. He would bend in two; snap; break.
I feel like there’s sun on my face.
I hate him so much.
He turns. “Smoke?”
“Okay.”
“Here.” He tosses me the pack.
I take one out and stick it in my lips. He comes over with his lighter and lights it. It seems sweet of him to do and it makes me not hate him as hard.
I take a drag off the cigarette. The smoke stings my lungs but in a good way. I let the smoke pour through my nostrils like a movie star.
I feel like I’ve walked through some door, into some room, and I’ll never be able to leave. I feel like nothing is the same. Just like that. Nothing will ever be the same again.
I also feel like I can’t ever tell anybody about this. I can’t tell Natalie, although I really, really want to.
What happened has to be all mine.
I feel crowded by this. Like I need to go home and think about it for a week or maybe the rest of my life. How can I go to school in the morning? It’s already after midnight and I have to be up at seven-thirty to make it there by eight-fifteen.
Neil opens the closet door. Inside a tangle of wire coat hangers crowds the far end of the pole. There’s nothing inside except a camera hanging from its neck strap by a hook on the back of the door. He takes the camera and aims it at me.
My underwear is on backwards but I don’t care.
He shoots me as I button my shirt. I button it up almost to the top.
“I want to taste me in you,” he says, tossing the camera on the bed. He comes over to me and takes my face in his hands. He kisses me. His tongue running across my teeth, filling up my mouth, looking.
I look past his head at the wall. I want to pull away. It’s time to go. I have to get home.
He presses up against me. Mashing his pelvis into mine. My bladder is full; I’ve got to piss.
He pulls away. “Let’s go.”
We go.
Downstairs, his roommate is sitting on the sofa chain-smoking and watching TV. I have a hunch that she is his failed attempt at heterosexuality. “Hi, honey,” she says to me. “What are you, like seventeen?”
“Thirteen,” I tell her.
She is fat. She is fat in a way that suggests she always has been, always will be, fat. When she raises her cigarette to her lips, I see that her fingernails are dirty and chewed. Her hair is a ravage of tangles, shoulder-length and the color of straw. A tiny gold cross hangs from a dainty chain around her neck. She is too large for this cross.
“Beer?”
I tell her no. She strikes me as somebody who has tasted a lot of semen. I want to ask her if it all tastes like alfalfa sprouts, or if it’s just something funky with him.
Neil says, “I’ll be back in a while. I gotta take him home.”
“Pick me up some more smokes,” she says. She coughs. She takes another drag and turns her face back to the TV. Mannix.
Neil takes his keys off the kitchen table, crumbs sticking to his fingers as he swipes. He gives them a toss into the air and catches them. “Ready?”
Of course I’m ready, I think.
We walk outside. I can see my breath, so I hold it. I want to keep it inside. I feel exposed. Enough of me has escaped into the air for the evening.
Neil opens the passenger door for me, like I’m a girl. And suddenly, I feel like a girl. I am ashamed. The door isn’t locked.
He walks around to his side and slides in. He starts the car.
The seats are freezing. I move my legs together, then I slide my hands beneath them. I look back at the house. The window near the door provides a dull, yellow light, mixed with some blue light from the TV in the other room. All the other windows are dark. The house itself is dark; during the day it’s probably gray or brown. At night, it’s black. There is no lawn. Just dirt and gravel where a lawn could go.
“You okay with what happened?” Neil asks, pulling onto Route 5.
I say, “Yeah. Sure.”
“Good. I hope I didn’t hurt you.” He turns to me. “Because I didn’t want to do that, hurt you.”
I nod.
“I just wanted to show you, you know, what you were in for. Being gay and all.”
“Yeah,” I say. I say it softly. I hardly say it. Or maybe I don’t even say it. Maybe I only think it.
We don’t speak for the rest of the drive. My window fogs and this makes me feel like there is no world outside of the car.
Again, that feeling that everything has changed. And the sensation, very real, of spinning.
Hope is awake when I walk in the door. She’s in the TV room, sitting on the couch, her legs tucked up beneath her. “Hi there,” she says.
“Hey, Hope.”
“Did you have fun with Neil?”
I make a smile. “Yeah, it was fun. He showed me his photographs.”
Hope unfolds her legs and reaches behind her head to scratch. “Oh yeah? That’s great. Did you two talk?”
I step further into the room. The TV is flipping. Why doesn’t she adjust the vertical hold? How can she watch her show like this? “Um, yeah. I guess. We talked some.” My lips feel swollen and I wonder if it shows.
“You look a little funny,” she says. “Is everything alright with you?”
Her feet are stretched out in front of her, buried in the plush, matted fur of her dog, Zoo. When she wriggles her toes, it looks like there are animals deep inside Zoo’s fur. The sofa fabric is threadbare, so smooth from wear that it’s slick.
I sit. I stare at the TV screen and think how much I want a cigarette, but how I’m too uncomfortable to smoke in the house; how it’s still my secret that I smoke. Natalie smokes, but she’s braver than me. When Agnes or Hope or her father bitch at her about smoking, she just tells them to fuck off. But I feel like a guest, trapped in my own politeness, so I can’t do that. Finally, I say, “It was just weird seeing all the pictures Neil took of New York City. Makes me want to live there someday.”
“I could see you in New York,” Hope says, turning to look at me.
“Yeah?”
“I really can,” she says. Then she takes her small bible from the table next to the sofa and places it in her lap. “You want to ask God about it?”
I shrug. “Okay, I guess.”
She pats the sofa cushion next to her. “Let’s do a bibledip.”
I slide over.
“Close your eyes,” she says.
I close my eyes and think of how to phrase my question. “Okay,” I say. “Will I end up living in New York City?”
Hope takes the bible in her hands and opens it to a random page. “Okay,” she says.
I stab my finger onto the page and open my eyes.
Hope leans in to see what word I hit. “Strength,” she reads.
I sit back. “What does that mean?”
Hope reads the surrounding words to try and gather context. “I think it means that you will need a lot of strength before you can move there. That you need to be very sure of who you are. I think it’s a very positive bibledip.”
“You do?”
“Absolutely. I think it means you’re in an enormous period of growth now and that when you come out of it, you’ll be strong enough to live where you want to live.”
This makes me feel better somehow. I like that Hope speaks fluent God. I like that she can almost predict the future.
Zoo rolls over on her side and lets out a deep, tired sigh.
Hope yawns. “I’m sleepy, too, Zoo,” she says. She sets her bible back on the table under the lamp and then turns the lamp off. “We’re going to bed.”
“Yeah,” I say, “me too.”
Hope leads Zoo out of the room and I sit and watch the TV flip. I can still smell Neil; it’s like his smell is trapped between my upper lip and my nose. I think I want to wash my face, take a shower.
The TV flips. I close my eyes. When I do, the dark triangle comes at me again. I swallow.
The crack in the ceiling. When I close my eyes, all I can see is the crack in the ceiling.
SCHOOL DAZE
H
ER DESK WAS IN THE CENTER OF THE ROOM AND EVERYONE who sat next to her, behind her and in front of her was her best friend in the whole wide world. They would pass her folded notes, which she would unfold, read and then pass to someone else, giggling. I often saw her leaning over and whispering something in someone’s ear. I was sure it was something nice. “Let’s surprise Heather after school and take her to a movie!” She had a puffy black afro that she adorned with combs and I used to sit there wishing I could touch it. I imagined it would feel woolly, like a sheep. But also lighter like cotton candy. I knew if I actually did reach across the two desks between us and touch her afro, she would scream. She was the whitest girl in school, even though she was black.
She was Bill Cosby’s daughter and I loathed her for this.
“He’s sooooooo cute,” she would say when one of her friends handed her a blue Smurf key chain. Or, “Venus was the goddess of love,” she would correctly answer in Greek mythology class, her bright white smile occupying one-third of her face.
This girl was everything in life that I wasn’t. She was smart, articulate, outgoing and popular. She came from the best of families and never wore the same clothes two days in a row. And I was positive she did not have razor burn on her face from kissing a man twice her age. She made me sick.
One of us had to go.
“I just don’t know what to do with you, you’re making me frantic,” my mother said, chewing her thumbnail down to the quick.
“Well, I’m not going back to that school ever again. I don’t fit in there and I never will. I have to get out now.”
“But you have to stay in school until you’re sixteen. It’s the law.”
“I can’t stay there for another three years,” I screamed. “God, I wish I were dead. I should just kill myself.” I felt like a trapped animal.
My mother said, “Don’t even joke about suicide.”
“What makes you think I’m joking?” Maybe I could just kill myself and get it over with. Maybe that was my only way out.
She stopped typing and reached for her Wite-Out. “I don’t have the emotional energy right now to deal with you when you’re all wild like this.”
I had been chain-smoking all night and pacing around the house, consumed with dread about school the following morning. I had gone over my list of options in my head and the list was short: leave school now forever.
My mother was in the middle of writing what she considered to be an important poem. ”It’s fifty pages long and I truly do believe it’s going to make me a very famous woman,” she said out of the corner of her mouth that wasn’t wrapped around her More.
“I don’t care about that fucking poem. I’m miserable. You have to do something.”
She exploded. ”Well, I care very much about this fucking poem as you call it. I am putting everything I have into this writing. I have worked hard all my life to be able to claim my writing as my own.”
“Well, what about me?” I bellowed. I wanted to shove her typewriter on the floor. I hated it and I hated her. I wanted to be a Cosby.
“You are an adult,” she said. ”You’re thirteen years old. You’ve got a mind and a will of your own. And I have my own needs right now. My writing is very important to me and I should hope that it would be important to you.”
Somehow, my mother had managed to turn this all around to her. She had a knack for this.
“I’m not one of your fans,” I shouted. I had heard Christina Crawford say this to her mother in Mommie Dearest and I knew my mother hadn’t seen the movie, so it would seem original.
“Well, at the moment,” she said, “I’m not one of your fans, either.” She turned away from me and began typing.
I unplugged her typewriter, freezing it.
“Goddamn it, Augusten. What’s the matter with you? Why are you doing this to me? I need support right now. Not attacks from you.”
I told her to fuck herself and then I stormed out of the room and went outside to sit on the front porch and fume. A moment later she appeared at the door. “Dr. Finch would like to speak with you on the telephone.” Her voice was calm, composed, like a receptionist’s.
“Fine,” I said. I worried I might be in trouble for terrorizing my mother. He might tell me that I’d pushed her too hard and now she would go psychotic again, unraveling all the hard work he had done on her.
“Hello?”
“Well, hello there, Augusten. What’s this I hear about you not wanting to go to school?”
I couldn’t believe it. He was talking about me.
I told him about how miserable I was, how I didn’t feel that I fit in and how I felt trapped and depressed and just wanted to be left alone so I could go to movies and write in my journal.
He listened to me without interrupting except with the occasional, “Uh huh,” and “I see.” Then he said, “Well, the compulsory education laws are such that you have to attend school until you’re sixteen years old.”
“I know but I can’t,” I said. I was desperate. He had to help me.
“Well,” he said with a deep sigh. I could picture him leaning back, massaging his forehead with his free hand. “The only loophole, or way that I can see to get you out of school for any length of time, would be a suicide attempt. If you tried to kill yourself, then I could legally remove you from school.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if you were to attempt suicide, I could explain to the school board that you were psychologically unfit to attend school, that you needed intensive treatment. I don’t know how long they’d buy it for. Maybe a month, two, three.”
“Well, how . . .” I was confused. “How does this happen? I mean, what do I have to do? You don’t mean, like, I have to slit my wrists or something?”
“No, no, no, that’s not what I mean. It would be a staged suicide attempt. A ruse.”
“Oh,” I said.
“But you would have to be committed to a psychiatric hospital. Basically what would have to happen is that your poor mother would have to find you—” He chuckled under his breath, amused by the scenario. “—and drive you to the hospital. You’d have to remain there for, oh, probably two weeks for observation.”
I confessed that I did not find the idea of staying at a psychiatric hospital that much more appealing than school. Only slightly.
“It’ll be like a mini vacation,” he said. Then, “Where’s your spirit for adventure?”
Now that sounded better. Even if I wasn’t exactly free to go to movies and see Bookman, I wasn’t in school. And that was the main thing. He was right, it would be an adventure.
“Okay, let’s do it.”
“Now let me speak to your mother,” he said.
When she hung up she said, “The doctor is on his way over.” She looked pleased. And I realized immediately the reason for this was because I would be out of her hair for awhile. She would have nobody in the house to tell her, “Stop listening to that fuc
king Auntie Mame. It’s been fifty times already.” She would no longer have to defend her need to compulsively sketch the Virgin of Guadeloupe in lip liner over and over for days at a time until she got the eyes right. She would be able to gorge herself on mustard sandwiches with the crusts cut off.
It was the ideal arrangement for both of us, it seemed.
I was upstairs in my rarely occupied room, staring out the window at the street thinking about that little Cosby bitch. She certainly didn’t have to choose between a mental hospital or the seventh grade. Why couldn’t I be like that? I told myself, All I want is a normal life. But was that true? I wasn’t so sure. Because there was a part of me that enjoyed hating school, and the drama of not going, the potential consequences whatever they were. I was intrigued by the unknown. I was even slightly thrilled that my mother was such a mess. Had I become addicted to crisis? I traced my finger along the windowsill. Want something normal, want something normal, want something normal, I told myself.
But there were things in my life so much more interesting than school. So much more consuming. Bookman didn’t have a regular job. He filled in for Hope at the doctor’s office as receptionist when she needed to run an errand. Together, they were his secretarial pool. So most of his days were open. Once I was free from school we could be together constantly. The thought made me ache with want.
That whole thing at his apartment really brought us closer together. “I realize that was wrong of me. It was almost abusive; I’m sorry,” he had cried.
“It’s okay,” I told him. Secretly I wanted revenge, but I also wanted his companionship, and that won out.
Bookman gave me attention. We would go for long walks and talk about all sorts of things. Like how awful the nuns were in his Catholic school when he was a kid and how you have to roll your lips over your teeth when you give a blowjob. Then we’d go back to the barn behind the house and fool around upstairs on his musty old mattress.
When I was sitting in school, surrounded by all those painfully normal, Cabbage Patch-owning kids, all I could think about was Bookman. Kissing him, touching him, hearing him say to me, “God, you’re becoming my whole world.”
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