A Very, Very Bad Thing

by Jeffery Self

  When you get to know someone so well that they’re ingrained in your memory forever, it’ll always feel like you could reach out and touch them. Even after all the twisting and spinning of our stories, even after he’s gone, he still remains, safely inside my mind. As if he never left at all.

  I COULDN’T SLEEP. I WAS doing that thing where you are trying so desperately to pass out that you cover your face in pillows and blankets in hope that the darkness will trick your body into thinking it’s already asleep and then your mind will follow through. (This has never worked for me or anyone else in the history of insomnia … but regardless, we continue to try.)

  The reality was that this wasn’t insomnia but mere excitement, a feeling somewhat foreign to my aggressively boring life. Christopher had stirred something in me—and no, I don’t mean in my pants, though, okay, maybe down there too. Something about the sparkle in his eyes made the world feel a little less black and white. Something about the way he looked at me made the voices in my head that had always told me that my life would never stray from the ordinary get quieter and quieter.

  I got up to get a glass of water. Why do we always do that when we can’t sleep? As if making yourself need to pee will do anything close to good. Regardless, I was filling a glass from the elaborate filtered pitcher my mother’s guru had given her for her birthday when I noticed a light on in my dad’s office.

  Dad never stayed up later than ten … and even then it was a rarity. So I knew something was going on.

  I tapped the partially open office door.

  There was a moment of startled rustling, followed by Dad’s distracted voice.

  “Hello?”

  I poked my head in. Dad’s usually organized desk was covered in papers.

  “Everything okay?” I asked. Dad’s face fell to a panicked expression.

  “Yes. Of course. I’m just doing some work. Why? Do you think something is wrong?” he rambled in the way you do when something is clearly and most definitely wrong.

  “Just checking.”

  Everywhere you looked in Dad’s office there was something interesting to catch your eye, whether it was a mask from some tribe he and my mother visited in New Zealand or a Mongolian tea set gifted to him by the witch doctor who’d come and stayed with us last Christmas break.

  “What’re you doing up?” Dad asked, taking a drink from a glass filled with a brown liquid that was clearly not his usual evening kombucha.

  “I couldn’t sleep. Are you … drinking?”

  Flustered, he set the glass down on a coaster carved out of petrified wood he’d picked up in Bosnia. He removed his glasses and massaged his temples.

  “Please don’t tell Sharon.”

  I had seen my father drink on two prior occasions: once at my aunt Gail’s wedding, which was such a debacle that the invitation should’ve come with a two-drink minimum, and once the night my grandfather died. Needless to say, seeing my father with a drink was not a sign of good news.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, letting myself into the room and closing the door behind me. Dad cleared his throat and motioned for me to have a seat.

  “I screwed up, Marley.”

  “How so?”

  His eyes scanned the countless papers spread across his desk as if the papers were poisonous snakes waiting to attack. He stared down at them intensely.

  “I think we’re losing the house.”

  He said this casually, so matter-of-fact it almost seemed like he was telling me what we’d be having for dinner in two weeks’ time.

  “We’re what?”

  He stood up and paced over to his bookshelf. I looked closer at the papers and realized they were bills.

  “You might not remember this, but about ten years ago your mother decided to let me be in charge of the bookkeeping around here. She’d done it herself for so long and she hated it. Then, once she got promoted to head of her department at school, she basically said, ‘What am I trying to prove?’ and turned everything over to me.”

  Mom had always been the alpha in our family—a sweet, gentle alpha, but the alpha for sure. Before Mom, Dad had been your average Joe, but after a few months together she had turned him into the hippie he had been ever since. She called all the shots, so for her to allow Dad to take the reins of something was probably the hardest thing she’d done since choreographing that three-hour ballet to the soundtrack of Die Hard 2.

  “So, fine,” I said. “You do the bookkeeping. What happened?” My eyes zoomed in on the words PAST DUE and FINAL NOTICE printed across so many of the bills in front of him.

  “Well, my last book wasn’t the hit we all thought it would be,” he said, tapping the bookshelf full of extra copies of Boston Tea Party Zombie Apocalypse. “The publisher put a lot behind it and I stupidly took on some loans in anticipation of all the royalties that would come rolling in. How was I to know that another author and another publisher would put out Boston Tea Party Zombie Massacre two months before my book came out? Anyway, the bank doesn’t like excuses—they just like to be paid back. Which I haven’t been able to do. And, to make matters worse, instead of telling your mother, I took out another line of credit against the house because I really believed we’d be fine. I thought I’d get another deal as big as the last one and pay everything off in one big chunk. That’s how it had happened in the past, so I was sure everything would work itself out.”

  The words fell out of his mouth quickly, as if spending too much time with them inside his mouth might make him sick. He took the last swig of his drink and put the glass down atop one of the many bills, creating a wet ring over the words FINAL NOTICE.

  “Dad—”

  He cut me off, sitting back down at his desk.

  “Greg. Please.”

  “Fine. Greg. You have to tell Mom. You can’t keep this a secret. You can’t lie to her and pretend everything is fine when clearly it’s not.”

  Unable to stay in one place, he stood up from his desk again. “I know. I know. I thought I’d fix this first; I thought I’d make it work and then it’d be fine and she’d never have to know. But … well, it’s not. And now I don’t know how to tell her or when to tell her. And I can’t do it now—she’s got so much on her plate at work. Also, you know how she gets when Mercury is in retrograde.”

  I decided to ignore the issue of retrograde; I was not in the mood to debate astrology with my moderately tipsy and extremely panicked father in the middle of the night.

  “But …” I started without really knowing what to follow up with. I just knew that the conversation couldn’t end yet. We had to figure something out.

  “I don’t know, Marley. Maybe what’s most important isn’t the truth but making sure everyone gets through whatever is going on and can come out on the other side for the better.”

  “And lying to Mom is going to make things better?”

  He sat down on the bench beside me. “It isn’t a lie if the intention is right, Marley. I just need more time to try and fix this.”

  He stared at me, eye to eye. His were reddish and puffy. It was strange to see them without his glasses. His face looked entirely different.

  “Do you really believe that, Dad?”

  He was quiet for a while. I could hear the creaks of our old house, the only house I’d ever lived in, the one my father might have lost.

  “I want to. I really, really want to.”

  AUDREY TEXTED ME DURING CLASS to A) remind me, yet again, how much she hated school and B) say we should go to the showing of Charade at our independent movie theater the following night. We were in agreement on both topics. We had a rule: I watched old movies with her if she watched garbage reality television with me. It was the best of both worlds.

  Between the kismet-like run-in with Christopher at the supermarket, the late-night confession from my father, and the fact that Christopher had said hi to me three times already and it wasn’t even lunch, it was turning out to be a pretty memorable week. And the last time I’d had a m
emorable week was the week I’d been home with a stomach flu and Bravo had aired a marathon of the entire Real Housewives of Beverly Hills series from start to finish.

  I was moderately out of it—and not just because I was listening to the coma-inducing voice of our history teacher, Mr. Bannockburn. (Honestly, though, if you’re going to try and teach a group of teenagers about the Cold War, drink a Red Bull first.) I hadn’t really been able to sleep after the encounter with my father. I had never seen him so stressed out. The threat of losing the house my parents had always referred to as their “temple of family” was no joke. It’s a disturbing feeling the day you realize your parents are just as screwed up as you are. I was lost in thought, weighing whether or not to say something to Mom before it was too late, when the bell rang and it was time for lunch.

  In a daze I wandered over to the cafeteria. Eleven fifteen is an obnoxiously early time to serve vegetable lasagna, but that didn’t stop the cafeteria ladies from doing it. I was halfway through the very long line when I happened to look up through my bangs and spot Christopher a few people ahead of me. With his brand-new backpack and all-American plaid button-up, he looked like an advertisement for the perfect teenager. He glanced up from his phone just as my staring had crossed the line from noticing someone you know to creepy weirdo who probably drives a windowless van. He smiled, only intensifying the all-American motif.

  “There you are!” he shouted over the hubbub of the cafeteria. “Come over!”

  He grinned at me so knowingly that I wondered if he knew who he was talking to. He kept motioning to me while I stood where I was, halfway smiling. Carefully, I made my way over, hoping I hadn’t made the mistake of thinking he was talking to me when in fact he had been talking to some gorgeous baseball player behind me the whole time.

  “Sorry … were you talking to me?” I asked. Then I added, a little too loudly, “Oh! Were you trying to help me cut in line ahead of all these other people?”

  The few people paying attention heard me and gave us the kind of angry faces you give to people who blatantly ignore the rules. Christopher let me into the line beside him, lying loud enough for people around to hear.

  “Don’t be silly; I was saving your spot in line while you were in the bathroom.”

  He squeezed my arm—a squeeze that sent a shiver down my spine and made me a little dizzy for a second or two. Then he whispered for me to go with it. This was the first time in history a cute boy had whispered something in my ear. This was the first time in history a cute boy had done anything whatsoever to my ear. We exchanged mischievous smiles, and I delighted in having something to share with him.

  We got to the front, the lunch ladies flopping the slices of room-temperature pasta onto our trays without so much as a smile or the apology each of us so rightfully deserved. We found a table close enough to the salad bar and band geeks that no one was sitting at it.

  “Sorry. I can be a little slow when it comes to stuff like that,” I said sheepishly, flinging my backpack onto the chair. This was a lie; I was almost never slow when it came to screwing over my peers.

  “Slow at what? Deception?” he asked, so straight-faced I was taken aback. It must have shown on my face because he immediately smiled and told me, “Kidding. Obviously.”

  Being behind on the joke was new to me, seeing as Audrey and I had our own language when it came to quipping about our rotten lives. Yet something about Christopher slowed me down or threw me off track from my usual avenue of sarcasm and highway of general snark. Up until he first smiled at me, I had lived my life so comfortably sarcastic and quippy that Audrey had always said I’d be a natural celebrity on Twitter. I would have joined Twitter by this point if it were still relevant or if I had the ambition—and that’s when you know you’re in trouble, when you’re too lazy to tweet.

  “Is it just me or is eleven fifteen an offensive time to serve vegetable lasagna?” he asked before stuffing a bite of the aforementioned entrée into his mouth. I felt a tingle in my heart.

  “Someone should be arrested,” I added, staring at mine like it was a sculpture in a modern art museum. This made Christopher burst out laughing, which made me feel like the million dollars someone would pay for the sculpture in said modern art museum.

  And we were off. Joke, joke, zing, zing. We effortlessly recapped the first half of our days to each other, like we did this all the time. We built upon each other’s punch lines, interrupted each other’s stories, finished each other’s sentences. He was genuinely making me laugh, and not in the way you pretend to laugh at everything a cute boy says at a party when you’re hoping he’ll have too many beers and forget he’s straight. It was all happening so organically, the way it always seems to in angsty teen movies in which attractive heterosexual white kids accomplish stuff.

  Despite his humor, he had a positive outlook on the whole school thing, pointing out that we were stuck there whether we bitched about it or not, so why waste the breath bitching? It was odd to be around someone with such a naturally happy attitude. It’s not that Audrey and I were total haters … but it would be a lie to say that complaining wasn’t one of our main hobbies. I wasn’t used to trying to see the good in something like school or, well, anything, but Christopher seemed to do so without any effort whatsoever. The Internet teaches people to judge things, not see things … and I was very much a child of the Internet.

  He swung back and forth between funny and sarcastic, sweet and surprising. He was the best of both worlds and above taking anything too seriously. He seemed unfazed by so many of the trivial things that would send me or Audrey into a total bitchfest. Like, how loud the band geeks were being as they discussed the latest developments in some computer game made specifically for band geeks and single, middle-aged men. Yet despite his positivity, he wasn’t one of those obnoxious people who was always happy. There was still the right amount of unspecified pain in his eyes for me to identify with him on a human level. This was an immense relief, because next to people who raise monkeys as their children, nothing is creepier to me than being 100 percent happy all the time.

  “How long have you been here?” he asked, looking around the cafeteria. I couldn’t help but imagine us as prisoners, me as the old-timer and him as the newbie fresh off his arrest for something a reader could sympathize with, like robbing an Apple Store after hours.

  “Too long. But since middle school, to be exact,” I explained. “What was your last school like?”

  He started to answer but had a mouth full of food, so instead he nodded until he’d finished chewing. I had never seen someone look so cute chewing with marinara sauce all over their chin—and Audrey had forced me to sit through every Godfather movie. Twice.

  “It was a private school, actually. Super-duper conservative and stuffy. It’s where all the big Branson preachers send their kids.”

  “Yikes.” I winced, thinking that my school sucked, but at least I didn’t have conservative nut jobs judging my every move. Aside from the handful of typical school bullies, the only person who’d had a hard time accepting me was myself … but that guy was a total jerk anyway.

  “It wasn’t so bad. It was a good school—there were a couple of mean teachers, but otherwise people were always really nice,” he said, before adding, “but that might just be because my dad’s famous.”

  “What about when you came out?” I asked carefully, feeling a bit too much like a reporter pretending to be sympathetic on a morning news program.

  “Most kids at school were fine. Same with the teachers. My parents were a different story.”

  “How so?”

  “Come on, Marley—my dad is literally Reverend Jim Anderson. You can imagine the shit storm that occurred when his only son was revealed to be the absolute worst thing he thinks a person can be.”

  “Did they kick you out or something?”

  “Oh God, no! That would be un-Christian of them.” He rolled his eyes. “No, instead they did the right thing … and tried to brainwash me. Ha
ve you ever heard of pray-the-gay-away camps?”

  “Holy crap! You went to one of those places?!” I gasped. I’d heard about that kind of stuff on the news, but never in a million years came close to experiencing anything like it myself.

  He nodded, wiping the marinara off his chin. “Yeah. It was pretty weird, but I didn’t take it seriously, and eventually they basically just gave up on me and let me go read in my cabin for the rest of the summer. I spent most of the camp finally reading The Hunger Games—which was fitting because we were stuck in the woods and pretty much everyone there wanted to kill me,” he deadpanned, then added after an awkward pause, “Kidding. I mean, about people wanting to kill me, not the reading The Hunger Games part. Speaking of which, doesn’t the dystopian future sound terrible?!”

  I couldn’t believe he could be so casual about all of this. I knew if what he was talking about had happened to me, I wouldn’t have been able to get over it. I would be scarred for life. I’m really good at pretending that I’m rubber and that all problems in life bounce off of me, but the reality is I’m closer to glue. Things stick to me; I’ve just gotten really good at pretending they’re not there.

  “But what about when you got home?” I asked. “Were your parents upset that it didn’t work or whatever?”

  He thought about this for a moment, then shrugged. “Yeah, but I basically said to them, ‘If you don’t bug me about it, I won’t bug you about it. Or we can make it a huge thing and I’ll run away and we’ll never speak to each other again and you’ll have to explain to all your followers why your son has disappeared.’ You’ve seen my dad and all his crazy disciples on TV, right?”