“It’s a pretty boring little town, isn’t it?” I say, to break the silence.
“Excuse me?” he says in a small voice, staring straight ahead.
“I said, it’s a pretty boring place. West Mendhem. There isn’t a lot to do.”
“Uh-huh,” he says, very slowly, like he’s thinking hard about it. But he doesn’t take his eyes off the front window.
I pull up in front of Cumberland Farms, which seems empty except for the cashier, some acne-ridden high school kid in a Mötley Crüe baseball shirt.
“Here we go,” I say, putting the hatchback into Park, leaving on the engine.
He pulls a decrepit five-dollar bill out of his wallet and hands it to me. “Would you kindly go inside and buy me a pack of Camel Filters?” he asks me, tentative and polite like I’ve never seen him before. “And an Orangina? And something for yourself, if you want it?”
“Don’t you want to go?” I ask him.
He points into the store. “That same fellow was in there last night and gave me funny looks. I don’t want him to start remembering my face.”
“Why not?”
“Well—because. Because it’s not wise.”
“Um. Sure. I’ll go,” I say, turning off the engine.
He smiles, politely again, and it seems genuine. “Thanks so much—Eustace?”
I laugh. “No. Eric. I’m not some dandy in an Edwardian novel.”
Now he laughs—a deep, abrupt laugh that feels to me like we’ve finally hit on some common point of humor, not a laugh at my expense or his. “I’m so sorry. Brooks,” he says, holding out his hand with that funny, grown-up 1950s kind of rectitude.
“I know,” I say, shaking his hand in the same phony-hale spirit. “I remember from last night.”
In the store, I take from the glass refrigerator a Coke for me and an Orange Crush for him because there’s no Orangina. (In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Orangina outside Boston or Cambridge.) At the counter, when I ask for a pack of Camel Filters, the Mötley Crüe kid gives me a curious look. Maybe he recognizes me as someone from school who doesn’t smoke. I only vaguely recognize his face; to me, he looks like one of dozens of pimply wastoid underclassmen who skulk around the hallways between classes, going from small engines to gym to earth science, or whatever.
Back in the car, I hand him his cigarettes and Orange Crush. “They didn’t have Orangina, so I got you this.”
“Oh.” He examines the Crush minutely. “Oh.”
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“I don’t think I can drink this. It’s too leaden. It’s hypercarbonated. That gives me the twitches.”
“Oh,” I say, distressed because he seems so distressed. “Do you want me to get something else?”
“No! No. Absolutely not. I’ll just—I’ll just hold onto this.” And he cradles it, somewhat ridiculously, in his arms.
“Are you sure?” I ask, popping open my Coke and starting up the car.
“Yes. I’m quite sure. Thank you, Eric. You’re very kind.”
“Pas de quoi,” I say, gamely, and he laughs shortly, but not phonily. Soon, I’m pulling off Route 136 and replaning the hatchback onto Great Lake Drive, under the leaves of maple trees that meet in an almost perfect arch high above the middle of the road. He’s packing his cigarettes, but not opening them up, and he’s so quiet I’m struggling for something to say to cut the silence. But I don’t have to. He speaks first.
“You start school soon?” he says to me.
“Wednesday,” I say. “You?”
“As well, Wednesday.”
“Are you nervous?” I ask.
“No. I’ll do the work, and stay on, or I won’t do it, and get kicked out. It’s a simple choice. There’s not a lot of gray area there. Why, are you nervous?”
He sounds disdainful, like he thinks I’m a grind who actually develops stomachaches over homework, which I don’t. I get migraines.
“Well, you’ve got to understand, it’s different going to public school. If you want to go to a good college, a really competitive college, it’s not like you come with a seal of approval from a place like St. Banner. You’ve really got to distinguish yourself.”
“I see,” he says. Now he’s got that faintly mocking edge back in his voice. “And what do you do to distinguish yourself?”
My first instinct is to enumerate for him the recipe for success I’ve enumerated for myself—grades, scores, awards, memberships, good attitude, and so on—but I don’t like the feeling that he’s ridiculing me again. “You find a cure for cancer in biology class” is what I say.
“Our medical establishment is in safe hands with you, I’m sure,” he says in an ultra-bored drawl.
“Thanks,” I say, sourly, and then, certainly without having intended to: “Why are you so fucking sarcastic about everything?”
“I’m so fucking what? I’m sorry?”
“Sarcastic,” I say again. “And cynical. It’s like, everything I say, you’ve got to cut down in some way, like you’re some character out of—you know—”
“Out of an Edwardian novel?” he says, so fucking polite and acid I want to kick him out of the car. But I don’t.
“Exactly! It’s like you’re incapable of ever being yourself, like you think you’re Oscar Wilde or something. You’re always onstage.”
Somewhat to my surprise, he snorts. “Who the hell are you to tell me I’m not being myself?” His voice loses its I’m-so-bored lilt. Suddenly it’s just loud, and harsh. “You’re some silly-billy townie who served me my pizza and then gave me a lift tonight, probably hoping that I’d tell you more stories about Paris so you can plagiarize me in your stupid college admissions essay.”
Then, I can’t believe it, I’m so embarrassed I want to cry. “Get the fuck out of the car, you fucking snob!” I yell, pulling over to the side of the road. “I’m just as smart as you are, and I didn’t get kicked out of two schools, either!”
He actually puts his long webby hand on the steering wheel and forces it back into the center of the road. “Of course they didn’t kick you out,” he says. “They need their little Ivy League token. But you’ll probably end up at B.C. or Notre Dame, or some other place with a lot of dumb Catholic honkies.”
“Fuck you! Lemme pull over!” I’m actually on the brink of tears now—I can’t believe it, I’m so mortified with myself, because I never cry, and when I say “over,” it comes out a big “ovah,” and I sound just like the Massachusetts idiot he thinks I am.
“You pull over here, and I’ll pull a knife on you,” he says, his hand still on the wheel. “You offered me services and now you’re going to render them.” Then, in a horrible, imitation-slave voice, he says, “I’s gonna learn you some responsibility, boy.”
I give up struggling—not because I’m scared, but because he’s won, he’s humiliated me, and even kicking him out of the car right here wouldn’t win things back for me. I stop sniffling and wipe my face dry. He takes his hand off the steering wheel and sits back in the seat. I just want to drop him off and never see him again, I’m thinking.
We proceed up Great Lake Drive in silence. I glance over at him once, and he’s staring out the window. Then, out of nowhere, he says, “Maybe if you thought I was being cynical and sarcastic with you, that’s because I thought you could give it back.”
“Not according to what you just said now,” I say, as calmly as him. “You just called me a townie and a dumb Catholic.”
“Well, you called me a knife-wielding spook.”
“No, I didn’t,” I say, outraged at his lie. But then it dawns on me that maybe he’s trying to be funny.
“I’m afraid you did.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. I guess my tongue slipped.”
He doesn’t laugh. Instead, he says, “I don’t really have a knife.”
“If you’re running around West Mendhem in the middle of the night, maybe you should have one. It’s a dangerous town.”
�
�I know. Little literary enfants terribles joy-riding after dark in their mother’s cars.”
And—I don’t know why—I laugh. It’s a funny image.
Now we’ve approached the stone wall that cordons the St. Banner soccer fields off from the street. “Pull over here. That way I can run across the fields and slip in the back way.”
I pull over into the shoulder of the road. “Would you douse your headlights for a minute, too?” he asks, and I do.
I can hear the crickets again in the bushes through the open window, and from beyond the soccer fields, there are squares of yellow light coming from the white buildings where they all live. I think about St. Banner, restful and assured in its green vale, and I think about him, who says he carries a knife but doesn’t, and for the first time I think I might understand why he keeps creeping away at night.
“I’m quite ready for my reentry,” he says, sotto voce, because it’s very quiet now. “My good man, good night.”
“Good night,” I say, trying to sound a little exasperated, but that’s not exactly what I’m feeling.
I’m waiting for him to get out. But he’s not getting out. He’s staring straight ahead, tightly gripping the Crush can in his hands.
“Eric,” he says, low, and my own name has never sounded so strange. Eric—that’s my name, people say it all the time, my family and friends, but I never see my face in my name when they say it.
“Uh-huh?” I ask, low, too. I’m shaking, and embarrassed because of it.
“I don’t think you’re a dumb Catholic.”
“Thanks.” It’s all I can think to say.
“In fact…”
“Uh-huh?”
“I think you’re quite bright for your demographic circumstances.”
“Thanks. I think.”
What kind of a compliment is that? I’m thinking. But when he puts his hand over the handle of the door, instantly I don’t want him to leave.
“Brooks?”
“Yes?” He sounds weirdly patient, like a tired professor, like he never expected me to just let him vanish out of the car and across the dark soccer fields.
“Where did you say you were from again?”
He takes his hand off the handle and it falls between his knees. We’re both staring straight ahead, not looking at each other, and he’s not answering the question. In fact, neither of us says anything for what seems like forever.
“Virginia.”
He moves his left hand up behind me and I can feel it now against the back of my neck, then his webby fingers running in my hair. I lean my head back against the seat of the car, and it’s like some casing around my whole body cracks, the way you can crack an entire mirror by tapping in a nail, once, at the center. It’s like I don’t have joints anymore, or bones, like I’m made up completely of soft matter, and I’m falling. No one has ever laid hands on me this way before.
“Where in Virginia?” I ask. When I hear my own voice, it sounds like a hollow, dying reed coming up out of some deep swell of terror and anticipation in my gut.
“Coastal Virginia,” he says. “In an old city. That’s very southern. Um. And beautiful.” He’s running his hands up into my scalp, back again down my neck and underneath the collar of my T-shirt. I raise my right arm over his left until my hand finds the back of his neck. It feels cool and faintly powdery, and underneath his ridiculous cap, underneath the hair cut short on the back of his head, I can feel the contours of the base of his skull. It’s strange to me; it feels so naked, like if he could let me know what the base of his skull feels like, then nothing he can say to me from now on, no bitchery or artifice, can ever cut me again.
“You live there with your parents?” I ask him.
“No. With a great-aunt.” With his right hand, he pulls off his cap and puts it flat on his lap, but it’s too late. Glancing down, I’ve already seen why. I’m in the same condition myself, and I know I should be embarrassed, but I’m not, oddly enough.
“You live with a great-aunt?” I ask. I know we’re taking our chances; anybody could drive by right now—a proctor, someone I know from school, the cops—and it feels like we’re sitting here in suspension until somebody does.
“Yeah,” he says, laughing a little. “She’s eighty-three. I’m going to get all of her money.”
“Lucky you.”
“Lucky me. Lucky Brooks.” He bends down his head and rests it on the bridge of our arms. I turn off the ignition and lean back in the seat, running my hand through his hair. It’s peculiar, though, because in the middle of this, we both actually start to nod off. It’s the high beams of another car, rushing forward, that causes us both to jerk forward and duck down in our seats until it’s gone.
“I should go,” he whispers, so harshly it’s almost a hiss, and reaches for the car door. He’s immediately tense again, dart-eyed and in recoil, and so am I.
“Okay,” I say, turning over the ignition. The noise is horrifying in the stillness. Now he’s got one foot out of the car and he’s scanning across the soccer fields, looking for watchmen, planning his route.
“Are you still slicing pizzas?” he asks me.
“Just Tuesday and Friday nights during school.”
“I’ll maybe visit some night,” he says, so seriously I feel like he should hand me his business card.
“Don’t get caught.”
“Don’t you. You’re the one with something to lose, Horatio.”
“What Shakespeare is that?”
He scowls. “It’s not. Horatio Alger?”
“Oh.”
“Ah, yes. You’ve heard of him.” Then he closes the door—softly—and in a moment he’s picked his way gingerly over the low stone wall, then he’s running along the edge of the soccer fields near the woods. He’s barely a shadow now, something faint and thumping against the grass in the middle distance of the field. I see him one more time—against the gray night sky, over the final rise at the far end of the field until it dips down into the campus—and then I am utterly alone by the side of the road.
Driving home, I’m preoccupied. I run a red light at the corner of Great Lake Drive and Route 136. A car coming from the left barrels wildly around me. “Asshole!” I hear, and catch about four upraised middle fingers flying from the windows as the car speeds on in the dark. My mother would call that a brush with death, but even a second after it’s happened, the moment already seems a thousand miles away.
When I get home, the house is dark. Everyone seems to be away, asleep, and I make it up to my room unbothered. I’m going to make a list of everything I have to do, I tell myself. I even go as far as opening up a new notebook and writing “To Do: Academic Year 1986–87.” But I don’t write a thing, because my brain is humming like a crazy man’s. I think about how far over the line I stepped tonight, and what if anyone in this house could read my thoughts right now, and do private thoughts leak? Do they show through, the way Grandma says you can’t hide a sin, because it seeps through?
But the flip side of that, deeper than that, defiantly and so thirsty for the precise cataloging of movement from just twenty minutes before: I think about the exact pressure and configuration of his hand on the back of my neck and the lineaments of his skull inside my palm, and the tents we each pitched in our shorts, and how mine is creeping back on me now—desire strong enough to summon it back even as the moment recedes—and how your own name can ring out in your head like a siren when somebody utters it plainly in want. And also, kneeling here now in the room where I have slept untouched for most of my life, I feel so loose of limb, like a husk just splintered, like a secret that cracks cleanly out from its heart and along the path of its fibers.
Now I’m carrying this secret on my person, already finding that it’s a nerve-racking thing, it’s like an explosive; you can’t ever jar it or walk carelessly. But as it grows in discomfort, it becomes more exquisite, too, if that makes any sense at all. Because you can’t share it with anyone, and precisely for that reason, maybe it�
�s the only thing that’s completely yours.
Three
It’s a Friday night around ten, and I’m starting to wrap things up at B.J.’s. When I say that, I mean it literally, not idiomatically: I’m actually wrapping up unused tomato halves in saran. There’s hardly anyone in here, except for two old men who live in the apartments for the elderly around the corner (they’re playing poker and talking about being stationed at some camp in Delaware during World War II) and Jimbo McGoff, who’s hunched over, shredding up napkins and talking to himself about dinosaurs, his favorite topic. Jimbo is the town crazy; he rides around all day on his old Schwinn in a trench coat and beat-up wingtips, getting kicked out of Dunkin’ Donuts and various stores. Phoebe thinks Jimbo is sexy. She says he looks like William S. Burroughs, and whenever she sees him, she wants to “interview” him about his philosophical beliefs for the school paper. I beg her to leave him alone, and she does, grudgingly. “I’m just fascinated by the way his mind works,” she says. “He could be you in twenty years, or me, or any of us.”
It’s been a trying week, and I’m wondering how I’m going to get through this year and keep my bearings with everything going on. First, school started: the same joyless putty-smelling corridors, burnt-orange carpeting, and particleboard bacon burgers for lunch. All the idiot students look the same, but this year, not only do I have to contend with a new crop of honors-class teachers, I have to get nearly perfect grades in their classes and ingratiate myself with them so they’ll write me sterling college recommendations. Phoebe and Charlie are in most of my classes; I’ve already given each of them the plot, themes, and symbolism of Tess of the D’Urbervilles so they can write the first English paper on their favorite book from the summer reading list.
The only teacher I find interesting (in a slightly creepy way) so far this year is Mrs. Bradstreet, who teaches honors American history. All the other teachers (guys) in the social studies department talk disparagingly about her because she went to Wellesley, and they all grew up in West Mendhem and played varsity football for the old high school before going to state teachers college and returning to the new high school, mostly to coach varsity football.
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