Words We Don't Say

by K. J. Reilly

  I decided to check it out for myself the next day.

  Which was my first mistake.

  My second mistake was way worse.

  In fact, my mistakes were what Mr. Monty, my eleventh-grade math teacher, called progressing geometrically, which he explained by saying that if you started with a penny and doubled it every day, in one month you’d have $10.7 million. When he explained the penny thing, Benj Kutchner was sitting right behind me and he leaned forward and said, “Hey, Higgins? Can I borrow a penny?” Then he whispered, “That’s what happens to problems, too.” And I figured that if he really did kill his parents, he would know. Mr. Monty called it a form of compounding, said it was a good thing, but later on Benj called it sequential worsening. I figured that Benj was right; things just started to get worse and worse once you made one mistake. And I imagined that you could go from one wrong to 10.7 million wrongs in thirty days just as if those problems were compounding pennies if you doubled your output each day. Something I learned wasn’t too hard to do if you were Joel Higgins and you were sequentially screwing up.

  * * *

  On that orientation night at the Hendricks Street soup kitchen Mrs. T warned us not to nose into their lives or try to save them. Said a whole bunch of docs had failed at that already so there was no point in our trying. “We’re just here to feed ’em,” she said, “not fix ’em.”

  I wished I’d listened to Mrs. T that day. Wished it a whole lot since that third Saturday in March. But something my pop always said stuck with me through all this. He usually didn’t say much. Not much of a talker, my pop, unless you counted all the screaming he did at the TV when the Yankees were losing. But when things got real bad, he’d revert to his quiet self, shake his head back and forth slowly, and say under his breath, “It is what it is.” Like whatever it was, it was a damned shame, but just like a blown-out tire or a seized-up engine, it was flat-out, undeniably unfixable.

  And that just about summed up what happened between Rooster and me. We geometrically progressed to flat-out unfixable.

  you should know about me:

  My pop’s named Jackson.

  My mom’s named Mary.

  I have one brother who’s five years old and we call Jace.

  Basically the things that I am good at, they don’t teach in high school.

  I don’t actually know what the things that I am good at are yet, ’cause other than playing video games or pulling a car engine apart and putting it back together again, I pretty much haven’t found any. But I know one thing for damned sure, it’s not the trombone or Euclidean geometry or diagramming sentences, or poetry.

  Or gym.

  Or French.

  Definitely not French.

  I can’t parlez-vous for shit.

  Math is pretty much a dead zone, too.

  To give you an example, here’s something Mr. Monty wrote on the board in math class:

  The average of four numbers is five less than the average of the three numbers that remain after one has been eliminated. If the eliminated number is 2, what is the average of the four numbers?

  Even before anyone else finished reading the problem, some freshman called out, “The answer’s seventeen.”

  Here’s what I was thinking about when that freshman was figuring that the average of four numbers that is five less than the average of the three numbers that remain after one has been eliminated when the one that was eliminated was 2, is 17:

  Eli.

  Rocket ships.

  Eli.

  NBA 2K18.

  Eli.

  The pretzels in the cafeteria.

  Eli.

  Pretty much in that order.

  Eli because she’s Eli and rocket ships because a SpaceX Falcon rocket just blew up at launch and NBA 2K18 because it has cool dribbling and hook-shot features and I was going to play it all summer with Andy but that got ruined because of the thing that happened and the pretzels in the cafeteria because they should have more salt on them and also be free because sometimes you want more than one and you don’t have enough money with you, and then Eli again and again, just because she’s Eli.

  Then when Mr. Monty started writing another meaningless-worthless-boring-ridiculous math problem on the blackboard that he said would be on the SAT, I started thinking that they should redesign the entire school transportation system and everyone should walk to school until eleventh grade and then they should give all of us our own cars with the money they saved on buses and bus drivers and bus headquarters and bus insurance and bus cleaning and bus gas and bus tune-ups and bus everything because the school bus is like an insane asylum on wheels and having your own car is cool.

  I was thinking, maybe Corvette Stingrays for the seniors and Camaros for the juniors.

  Then Mr. Monty said, “Joel, are you paying attention?” And I said, “No fucking way. I have far better things to think about.”

  But I left off the “fucking” part and the “no” part and the “I have far better things to think about” part, too.

  So, I pretty much said, “Yes, sir. I am paying close attention.”

  Then he asked me to factor the equation he had written on the board. This is what it looked like:

  x2—3 = 2x

  I was thinking, there’s no way I know how to do that. And then I looked down at what I had written in my notebook so it looked like maybe I was trying to factor the equation and I had figured out that 114 Corvette Stingrays (that was how many seniors we had) at $55,450 apiece would cost the school district just about $6,321,300, and 97 Camaros for the junior class at $25,905 each would cost $2,512,785, so together that was $8,834,085. I had recently looked it up on my phone and I knew that the whole transportation budget for the school district was just about exactly $8 million, so that basically meant we would have to be given less expensive cars.

  Then I said, “With regard to factoring, sir, I’ve got nothing.”

  That annoying freshman had his hand up again, and he was frantically waving as if an alien had planted an exploding math pod in his head. Mr. Monty called on him and the kid said, “The answer is negative one and three.” He hadn’t even used a pencil to find it and we all knew he was right. I mean, come on, he was a freshman in eleventh-grade math.

  Then Mr. Monty looked back over at me and he made that face that all of my teachers made when it was clear they weren’t getting through to me and they wished that they were. Or maybe it was just that they were wishing that I was a different person or in a different class, or living in a different country like Estonia or Yemen or Kyrgyzstan, or maybe back in third grade, where they could start over and correct some of these problems before they even started.

  Here are a few other things you should know about me:

  Last December I got the lowest score you could get on the SAT. Apparently, the only thing I got right was my name.

  I’m always surrounded by people, but I have no real friends. Not even one. At least not anymore.

  The things most kids care about don’t matter to me.

  And I think everyone I know has a horrible illness and is going to die any minute. Especially me.

  Plus, I’m not tall enough or big enough for sports, except for the horrible sports like gymnastics and wrestling. I do not want to roll around with sweaty guys on a sweaty mat or hang from rings in tights. I would like to roll around on a sweaty mat with Eli, especially if she was wearing tights—or no tights. Either way. In her case, I’m pretty flexible on the tights. But she’s not in my gym class, so that’s pretty much not an option.

  I got suspended in the beginning of the year for hitting someone on the school bus, which is frowned upon. But believe me, the kid deserved it. It was the second week of school and Benj Kutchner had just got-ten on the bus at the corner of Adams and Hillsdale, and Anthony Pittsfield, who is known to everyone as the Pittster because he sweats so much that his shirts always have wet circles under the armpits, stuck his foot out on purpose and tripped Kutchner for no reason and h
e landed flat on his face in the bus aisle. I was sitting two rows back and saw the whole thing, so I hopped up and decked the guy. Didn’t even really know Benj then either. I mean, I knew he was the new kid who probably killed his parents and that he was really annoying but that’s no reason to trip someone.

  I also have 212 unsent text messages on my phone to Mr. Redman, the principal of Calf City High School—or CC, as we call it for short.

  I have 454 unsent text messages to Eli.

  And 235 unsent text messages to Andy.

  The whole reason that I have all those unsent text messages stored on my phone is because Mrs. Wilson, the school psychologist who has no idea what she is doing, who I had to go see last year after the thing that happened with Andy, suggested that I write whatever I was thinking about in a journal, and I said, “No fucking way.”

  Except without the “fucking” part.

  Which pretty much means I said, “No way.” Politely.

  As in, “I don’t think that would work for me, Mrs. Wilson, but thank you for the suggestion.”

  But then I just started writing text messages on my phone like I was going to send them, except I stopped before I hit send and instead I hit save to draft. I got the idea after I saw this girl on a rerun of the TV show Shark Tank, which is where some people go when they invent shit and start businesses and try to get investors to give them money. This girl—who was sixteen years old just like me—invented an app called ReThink for kids’ phones and tablets and computers, so if they typed anything foul smelling and atrocious, or just flat-out nasty, a message would pop up on their screen:

  ReThink! Don’t say things that you may regret later!

  It’s like a pause button for brains that don’t have pause buttons, which is pretty much everyone I know in high school. Anyway, the girl who invented the app said that she did a test and 93 percent of the time—or maybe it was 87.2 percent or 89.3 percent of the time, I can’t remember—kids deleted the bad message when that ReThink warning popped up.

  So basically she invented a way to put duct tape over kids’ nasty mouths and help stop cyberbullying, and when I saw that show, I decided that I was a total loser because I didn’t invent a way for kids to stop hurting each other. And then I decided that I could write text messages and not send them at all but not delete them either. It was sort of like I invented my own app to talk to people I wanted to talk to but couldn’t talk to for a whole variety of reasons that I won’t get into. That meant that I didn’t have to ReThink because I never hit send, which meant that I could pretty much say anything that I wanted to say without worrying about ReThinking, which would be a pretty cool app if you think about it and probably if I did a test 93 percent or maybe 87.2 percent or 89.3 percent of kids who used it would like it. I mean, who wouldn’t like to say anything they fucking wanted to, to anyone they fucking wanted to say it to, but then not say it and not delete it but just save it for later so you could see how screwed up and weird you were at some future date?

  So I pretty much kept a journal like Mrs. Wilson said, just on my phone.

  I’m thinking about maybe taking the idea to Shark Tank. I think all of the nice sharks would like it. Except the old, bald guy they call Mr. Wonderful just to be ironic, because he’s mean and wouldn’t get it. Plus he says, “You’re dead to me,” if someone won’t take his deal, which is no different than bullying. He probably sat in the back of the school bus in high school and picked on kids who had hair. Which was pretty much everyone.

  Which is why we shouldn’t have buses at all.

  Because of Mr. Wonderful on Shark Tank we should all be driving Corvettes and Camaros.

  TEXT FROM JOEL TO PRINCIPAL REDMAN 1:17 p.m.

  About my end the bus campaign.

  If we can’t get the Stingrays, classic Mustangs are cool too.

  TEXT FROM JOEL TO ANDY 2:14 p.m.

  There’s a new kid in school this year. He probably killed his parents but you would like him even though he’s really annoying. And maybe a felon.

  They had pizza at lunch.

  I had two pieces and a pretzel and plain milk.

  They don’t have chocolate milk anymore. You would hate it.

  TEXT FROM JOEL TO PRINCIPAL REDMAN 3:59 p.m.

  Gym sucks. We should do something about gym too.

  As long as we’re fixing stuff.

  TEXT FROM JOEL TO ELI 1:15 a.m.

  I pretty much love you. I mean, I know you don’t love me but maybe you should know how I feel. Just in case.

  It’s Joel by the way.

  I mean, just in case you don’t have my number saved in your phone.

  Joel Higgins.

  started as nothing, then became something real fast.

  The day after I saw him heading into the woods, I walked back there myself. The Richardson place was close to a hundred acres and they raised chickens and grew apples on real old trees with big old scraggly limbs like the ones you might see in a spooky kids’ cartoon at Halloween. Real quiet, too. A sort of run-down gentleman’s farm where the gentleman’s really old and not up to keeping after the place and not quite rich enough or interested enough to pay a whole bunch of someone elses to do it for him.

  Back in the woods, just a few hundred yards from the tree line, I came across a shanty behind one of the Richardsons’ old barns. The barn was way past needing paint and was courting a date with a bulldozer if you asked me, but the shanty, I figured, could be felled by the driving gust of a whisper. It was easy to find, too, since Rooster wouldn’t leave that damned shopping cart of his behind and it left wheel marks in the brush that didn’t take high-level tracking skills to identify. Plus, he had a couple of backup shopping carts full of all kinds of shit stashed back there as well. His place was slapped up with a few pieces of plywood and sheet metal and a few two-by-fours and old fence posts that were lashed together with a whole lot of rusty wire and rope by someone who had clearly not been thinking right. Inside was nothing but a dirt floor knee-high in garbage. And I mean garbage. It was a rat’s nest of a hovel that made me feel even worse than I thought it was possible for me to feel about anything or anyone.

  What Rooster had in the woods behind the Richardsons’ place was as bad as it gets.

  He wasn’t there, but I left him a few things by the door that I thought he could use. I’d brought some canned food from my mom’s pantry, the kind that had pull-off lids, figuring that he probably didn’t have a can opener. And I left him a pair of my socks because I read that socks were real important to homeless guys. I don’t know why socks and not blankets or shoes or anything else but I brought the socks and a toothbrush, too, even though teeth were likely not a top priority, considering. Just left all the stuff by the entrance without actually going inside. Figured this was his home and I hadn’t been invited in.

  Not that I wanted to be invited in, but still.

  Then I just walked back out on the same path I came in on, and headed on my way.

  a habit.

  Obsession, really.

  And real fast, too.

  I started stopping by Rooster’s a couple of times a week to drop stuff off for him. My mom kept asking me, “Joel, where are all your socks?” And I would play dumb and act like the washer ate them—we all know the washer eats them—or suggest that they walked off on their own in violent protest over the nasty condition of my feet.

  Not sure if I was doing this for Rooster or for me, but either way that’s what I did.

  Got me in some trouble at school, too. Fuckin’ Benj Kutchner saw some cans of food in my backpack one day and he reached in and grabbed a fifteen-ounce can of Libby’s fruit cocktail, pulled open the pop-top lid, and slurped it down right there in third-period Chemistry, right before the teacher showed up for class.

  “What the hell you got in here, Joel?” he asked as he nudged my backpack with his foot, heavy syrup running down his chin. “A food pantry?”

  Then Alex B. Renner—who no one called Alex because he went by his ful
l name at all times—said, “Be quiet, turds. I’m scoring my practice math SAT.”

  Smack Hemmings ignored him and yelled, “Joel’s a fruit cocktail.” And Mikey Malone said, “Shut the hell up, dipwads.” Then Alex B. Renner said, “Boom! 750!” And pretty much everyone wanted to poke his eyes out with his protractor or strangle him with his laptop cord.

  I wish it would have ended there, but things went downhill on account of the fact that I punched Benj in the face just as Mr. Klein walked into the classroom catching only the tail end of the dispute. Mr. Klein just saw the reaction, not the cause, which as a chemistry teacher he should have recognized as problematic. But he didn’t, and he tagged me as the guilty party.

  My pop had to come down to pick me up from Redman’s office because the school basically operated under the teachers-intervene-to-fix-everything method of conflict resolution while my pop taught me the take-it-outside-and-work-it-out-between-yourselves technique. From my experience, as long as two guys were evenly matched, my pop’s way tended to work out better than if someone made you behave some way that you didn’t want to.

  Whenever I had an argument with my brother, Jacey, I would joke and say to my pop, “Can we take it outside and work it out ourselves?” Not really meaning it of course ’cause Jace was just a little kid and I would never hit him or most people for that matter except under the most extreme circumstances. Pop would say, “No, you’re not evenly matched,” and I would look at him and then he would wink and say, “Jace would take you in a second, Joel.” Jacey would be so proud he would forget what we were fighting about and I would scoop him up and race around the living room holding him upside down with him screaming and having the best time of his life and Pop would say, “Take it outside, both of you,” meaning the horsing around, not the fight. And then he’d add, “I mean it. Outside. You two are blocking the TV,” and the whole fight thing between Jace and me would be over and Pop would be back to yelling at the Yankees and Jace would go back to playing with his trucks and I’d go to my room to type text messages to Eli and Andy and Principal Redman that I had no intention of ever sending.