Seth’s eyebrows rose, and Mitchell chuckled. Sasha smiled smugly and threw her arm around Sabrina. “I like this one. She’s got grit.”
“How do you feel about creative control?” Seth asked.
“You do your job, and I’ll do mine.”
Seth nodded and held out his hand. “I think we’re going to get along fine.”
The band wanted to continue practicing, and Sabrina needed to get home, so I walked her to her house before continuing on to my own. Later that night I was FaceTiming with Seth when he asked if I could sneak out because his mom was staying the night at her boyfriend’s, and he was lonely. My parents had already gone to bed, but Mai was still awake and studying. I told Seth I couldn’t because of the aforementioned reason, but he begged and pleaded until I finally told him I’d try.
I popped over to Mai’s room and told her I had to run an errand.
“Where would you need to go at this hour?” she asked. It was after ten o’clock.
“I need more…supplies,” I told her, which wasn’t a lie. She rolled her eyes and made a face at me, then told me to be back by midnight or she was waking up our parents. I stopped by the gas station for more condoms then biked over to Seth’s house. When I got there, he greeted me with an exuberant kiss. Then we raced each other up the stairs to his bedroom, tore away our clothes like they were made of tissue paper, and went at it.
Afterward, we were lying naked in his bed with the covers off because it was hot in his room even with the ceiling fan on. Seth’s house always had a cloying heat about it because their air conditioner was broken, and his mother couldn’t afford or didn’t want to fix it or buy a new one. I’d already promised myself to buy Seth a window unit for Christmas—a gift to the both of us.
As I was lying there, I began thinking again about Sabrina—what she’d said about our power struggles and how tough she’d been with Seth earlier that day, how well he’d responded. I started to worry I was too submissive and that Seth might be taking advantage of my compliant, eager-to-please nature by making increasingly impossible demands. Even worse was the fear that if I was too much of a pushover, he’d get tired of me and move on.
“We can’t do that stuff at school anymore,” I said to him. I was lying on my back with my arms splayed outward like a bat.
“What stuff?” Seth asked, playing dumb. I turned my head to give him a look. His eyes narrowed, not appreciating the attitude in my expression. “Did you tell someone about it?”
I didn’t answer him, so Seth rolled up to a cross-legged position beside me. He drew his thumbnail down the center of my chest, from my sternum to my navel, like a medical examiner performing an autopsy.
“Did you tell Sabrina?” His tone was gentle, but I sensed a warning lurking there.
“No, she followed us the other day during lunch.”
“That’s creepy.”
I looked upward and tracked the lethargic path of the ceiling fan, so he couldn’t read my expression. “Anyway, it can’t happen again.”
“Why not?” he asked testily.
“Seth, I was giving you head behind the dumpster. At our high school. I mean, that’s kind of gross, not to mention all the broken glass, and if someone caught us, we’d probably get expelled.” I didn’t want to think about my parents finding out—what a disaster that would be.
“We wouldn’t get expelled,” he said like I was overreacting.
“Expelled or not, we can’t risk it.”
“I don’t want other people dictating our relationship.”
I threw up my hands in frustration. “This has nothing to do with other people, Seth. This is what I want.”
“I don’t think so.”
He was being unreasonable, and this was further proof that I needed to stand up for myself. My anger at even having to fight with him about it made me rigid and prickly. I sat up and started putting on my clothes. I couldn’t win against him in an argument, but I was an expert at the silent treatment. My frosty silence was my protest, and Seth, even with his compulsion to be in charge, was getting better at knowing when to back down.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Seth asked as I yanked up my jeans. “We’re in the middle of a conversation.”
“This isn’t a conversation. This is you refusing to listen to me.”
“I am listening, Hiroku, but I don’t want you telling Sabrina or anyone else about the things we do,” Seth said possessively.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s none of her business,” he said severely. “And because our sex life is interesting, and I don’t want her to influence you with her missionary-only, wait-until-marriage Puritanical bullshit.”
I doubted Sabrina was as much of a prude as Seth made her out to be, and it wasn’t that I wanted to tell her about the mechanics of what we did, more that I wanted to talk to someone else about the way he made me feel. I was a private person, but all of this was new to me, and sometimes I felt like I needed a second opinion.
“Is this normal?” I asked him, trusting him to know because even though I didn’t like to think about it, he’d been with several other people before me. “It feels way too powerful to me.” He felt too powerful. I had no control over myself when we were together, and I felt the same way when we were apart.
Seth reached for my hand and pulled me down on top of him. My pants were on but undone enough for him to snake his hand inside and give me a gentle squeeze. He kissed me with fervor, until my frustration with him felt petty and insignificant, and all I wanted was to be held like this, kissed like this, adored by him.
“Why would you want normal, Hiroku?” he asked with his sphinxlike smile. He was so good at putting my questions back at me.
“You know what I mean.” I propped myself on my forearms, still straddling his hips with my thighs.
“I’m liberating you, Hiroku, and purging you of all the heteronormative garbage you’ve been spoonfed your entire life. Our sexuality is the ultimate expression of our art. Why would you want to box yourself in by society’s expectations? The spectacle of who, what, when, where, etcetera, etcetera…”
I gave him a hard look. In the same way Seth was learning when to back off when I felt cornered, I was learning how to sift through his bullshit. I pushed myself off the bed to finish dressing. It was now a lot more difficult to zip up my pants.
“School’s off limits,” I said as the final word. “You can wait until after 2 p.m. to unleash your artistic expression on me.”
Seth winked at me like a scoundrel. “Fine, but only because I love it when you play hard to get.”
“Not that hard,” I fussed at him, which only made his smug smile widen.
NOW
A few weeks into my program at New Vistas, I begin to awaken. Maybe it’s the meds leveling off or the drugs finally leaving my system. Likely, it’s me accepting my captivity in New Vistas as the new normal. In any case, I begin to have cravings for things other than drugs or Seth. Things like ice cream, a song, a splash of color.
Dr. Denovo wants to encourage me, so he adds art therapy to my program. We do finger painting during my first session—about a half dozen of us rehab kids and the instructor—and it sounds childish, but it feels sooo good. Swirling the cold, muddy paint with my fingers, skating over the surface of the blank page, creating new colors, shapes, and textures.
It feels a little silly, but I begin painting my face, my arms, my clothes. Our instructor goes with it, and my compadres join in. Soon enough we’re painting each other’s skin, mixing the primary colors to make purples, oranges, and greens. Laughing, connecting, like some strange rehab Coachella. Most of us leave the paint on our faces for the rest of the day until it’s cracked and peeling and flaking off like a mud mask.
Later that night when I’m taking a shower, I feel such a loss when I finally have to wash it away. Staring at my reflection in the warped plastic that passes for a mirror, I try to figure out why I’m so sad, and I realize that for a fe
w hours, I was unrecognizable.
I wish I could be someone completely different and new.
THEN
Winter break came, and we spent almost all of our time together. The seven of us—Seth, Sabrina, Mitchell, Jeannie and I, along with Caleb and Sasha whenever they were able—hung out together in Seth’s garage. Because we were out of school, my parents let up a little on my curfew, and I was able to stay out until the late-night hour of 11 p.m., partly because they thought I was with Sabrina, which I was. Only they didn’t know we weren’t at her house. It also didn’t hurt that I told them I was working on a legitimate school project, a photo essay on an up-and-coming Austin rock band.
All of a sudden it seemed Seth, Mitchell, and Sabrina were no longer just messing around; they were becoming a real band. Seth would croon into the microphone while staring and gesturing at me, pretending that I, their audience of one, was his crowd of adoring fans. Seth’s style ranged from an I’m-coming-to-get-you growl to an ethereal and vulnerable alto. If there weren’t other people around, I could get off just on watching him perform. As it was, I often offered to get food or run errands to give myself a break from the constant sexual tension.
Everyone contributed to their new musical sound, but Seth was the star.
Seth had to set up more lawn chairs to fit all of us, and we took turns buying food and drinks. The band found their lead guitarist by putting an ad on Craigslist: an older guy named Dean who worked on cars for a living and knew Mitchell and Caleb through their misadventures at Sunoco.
Dean was like air to Seth’s fire and they fed off each other's talent and energy like Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. They both liked experimental, free-floating space rock and would sometimes jam out on sound to the point that Mitchell would start vaping and Sabrina would come in with the drums to get them back on track, which usually spawned an argument. She was an excellent equalizer for Seth. She was disciplined, structured, and orderly where Seth was mercurial and chaotic. She kept him in line and firmly rooted to the rest of the band. And in their creative disputes, Sabrina held her ground. I was sometimes tempted to take sides, but I refrained, deciding not to get involved in fights between siblings, especially because they both outclassed me in the arena of musical theory.
But the band needed a name, and nothing we’d come up with so far had stuck. We were all sitting around the garage one evening in the settling dusk, band practice having finished for the night—Seth’s neighbors kept him on a strict schedule of no noise after dark. The older kids, with the exception of Dean who was a recovering alcoholic, were leisurely getting drunk while Sabrina and I sipped on our juice boxes. Seth thought it would be funny to buy us Capri Suns. The joke was on him, though, because Capri Suns were my favorite, and my mom never bought them.
“All right,” Seth said. “Everybody just spitball now. No judgment. No hating. Anything goes.” He was using his phone to dictate their ideas.
Sasha piped up with The Splints, a variation of The Shins, which Caleb countered with The Shin Splints and then The Broken Ankles to tease her a bit. She stuck her tongue at him in response, and I caught the flash of a metal stud—that piercing was new. Mitchell took it even farther with Internal Bleeding, which Seth really liked. From that spun all sorts of medical conditions, both real and imagined. Everyone agreed that any form of cancer was too depressing, even though some of the names sounded cool. Sabrina really liked Death by Laughter, which was one of the ten strangest ways to die, according to Google. Who knew you could die laughing? Seth thought that had to be one of the best ways to go, right after his preferred cause of death and what he hoped to accomplish one day far into the future: suffering a heart attack during sex. Then he looked at me and said, “I’m counting on you, Hiroku.”
I took off my shoe and threw it at him. He sniffed it like a total weirdo so that I had to wrestle him to get it back. He’d go to any length to embarrass me—even better if he could do it while putting his hands on me.
“How about Melancholy Dreams?” I said, trying to get us back on track. Their music had a saddish sound but was also quite lovely. Seth liked that, but Mitchell thought it sounded too gloomy.
“We’re not writing songs to slit your wrists to,” Mitchell insisted, but if Seth had his way, they probably would.
“Capital Offense,” Dean contributed, which I rather liked, but Seth thought it sounded too prisony and if not that, then too rapey.
That launched us into names centered around crime and punishment. Sabrina suggested Petty Theft, which inspired me to contribute Petty Crime. Everyone liked that, especially Seth who went back and forth as to whether it should be Petty Crime or Petty Crimes or Misdemeanor, which Caleb ruined by saying it reminded him of a gothic stripper’s stage name. This brought on a conversation about what exactly was a gothic stripper, and Caleb said, “You know, like a vampire stripper? She gets naked and then sucks your blood.”
“That sounds hot,” Sabrina said while staring at Jeannie, who had been mostly silent during our brainstorm. I’d noticed Sabrina’s attention often drifted toward Jeannie. Like when she’d complete a really rocking drum solo, Sabrina would look toward Jeannie to see if she was paying attention. As far as I could tell, Mitchell hadn’t picked up on it. Jeannie was straight, I thought, so I was more concerned about Sabrina getting her feelings hurt than an inner-band tryst.
After that, we went through the names of thought experiments, thanks to Sasha’s Intro to Philosophy class at Austin Community College: Schrodinger’s Cat and Pavlov’s Dog, The Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Experience Machine, which brought about a much larger debate about the Matrix and whether you would choose to plug into a virtual reality designed to maximize your pleasure rather than experience the ups and downs of real life to which Seth said, “absolutely” and then added, “but only if Hiroku could come with me.” I rolled my eyes but was secretly flattered. Sasha argued that it wouldn’t be me in the machine with him, but a simulation of me, to which Seth said, “good enough,” which cooled my warm feelings just a bit.
We threw out a few more suggestions, but our creativity was waning, and we were sliding into kitsch. In a truly democratic fashion, Seth narrowed the choices down to three, and then we took a vote—all eight of us, not just those who were in the band. The winner, almost unanimously, was Petty Crime, singular, which Seth said implied the plural and covered a host of misdemeanors including theft, prostitution, trespassing, and vandalism. “We can do a lot with that,” Seth said astutely, “both thematically and with marketing.”
I was sincerely impressed with Seth’s long-term thinking. He was turning into a real Future Business Leader of America. I also glowed a little on the inside to think I’d contributed creatively to the naming of the band. We glanced around at one another, recognizing that this venture of ours had just gotten real. For the first time ever, I truly believed the newly minted Petty Crime had a shot at making it.
As Seth was fond of saying, we were making musical history.
Winter break came to an end, and we all reluctantly went back to our lives—school and jobs and schedules and for me, a maddeningly early curfew. All of us except Seth. Mitchell still picked me up in the mornings before school, but Seth was no longer with us.
When I mentioned that I missed him at school, Seth told me he’d been caught up in composing music for the band. He was in one of his manic episodes, where his mind spun faster than he could communicate. A lot of times he’d use his phone to record his thoughts and ramblings to be unraveled and made sense of at a later date. The only way I could connect with him during that time was by working alongside him on lyrics to his music. I also flexed my graphic design chops by creating a few logos for Petty Crime, which prompted Seth to put me in charge of merch. I thought he was joking, but he then gave me a list of demands as to who should be the T-shirt vendor and told me to research local businesses online.
Other times Seth would play the melody on his guitar, and I’d tell him what it reminded me of—ridin
g in a car at night with the windows down or that feeling you get at a party when everyone is having fun, but it’s like you’re looking in through the window at yourself, like Ebenezer Scrooge watching his younger version have fun with his old friends without him. No idea was too abstract or ridiculous, which was so encouraging for me as an artist. I’d had my father my whole life telling me to be practical, have more common sense, and not waste my time with drawing or video games or comic books. With Seth, there were no limits to our self-expression.
Still, I worried for Seth’s future and what might happen if all of this went belly-up. Perhaps that was my father in me, but I couldn’t help but wish Seth had a backup plan.
And then there was the whole other matter of the drugs.
On the way to school one morning, I asked Mitchell about Seth’s mounting school absences. He kind of shrugged and said, “You know Seth.”
It bothered me that Mitchell hadn’t said anything to him or pressured him to keep coming to school. Sabrina would have reamed me out relentlessly if I even considered dropping out of high school, especially when they were so close to graduation.
“Aren’t you worried about him?” I asked.
“I’ve known Seth for a long time,” Mitchell said casually. “He’s like a cat. He always lands on his feet.”
With a bit more probing, Mitchell revealed how the two of them met. When Seth was nine, his mother took a trip to California and left Seth behind. Her friends, where they were living at the time, tried to contact her but couldn’t, so they turned Seth over to the Department of Family and Protective Services. His grandmother used to be the one to pick up his mother’s slack in the parenting department, but her health was in decline, so Seth was put into foster care. Mitchell and Caleb’s parents were Seth’s second set of foster parents where he lived for about nine months until his mother returned and was able to convince the courts she was fit to be a guardian again.
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