Cupid Painted Blind

by Marcus Herzig

  I turn around and make a step back, stumbling over my own stupid feet and landing butt-first in the puddle. As Sandy and Zoey jump and shriek, Jack’s bike comes to a halt inches in front of me while I feel dirty water seeping into my butt crack.

  “Jack!” Sandy exclaims in half-hearted outrage.

  “Hey, girls,” Jack says.

  It’s not that he’s greeting just Zoey and Sandy while ignoring Alfonso and me. Whenever he meets just the two of us, he always calls us girls just the same.

  Jack is the kind of person who thinks that’s hilarious.

  My affectionate nickname for Jack is Jackrabbit, by virtue of his rather prominent front teeth.

  Come to think of it, it’s not really that affectionate.

  Also, I would never dare call him that to his face.

  While I rub the seat of my shorts to assess the water damage, Sandy throws herself around Jack’s neck, her outrage from two seconds ago all but forgotten.

  “Jack! Oh my God, I’ve missed you! How have you been?”

  “All right,” says Jack with a broad grin at me and my soaked butt crack as he rubs Sandy’s back with one hand.

  “We were just talking about our electives. I’m taking Chinese, can you believe it? So what are your electives, Jack?”

  “Yeah,” Zoey seconds the question, “what are your electives, Jack? Bullying and tomfoolery?”

  Smiling a condescending smile, he says, “Those are classes that I teach, honey, not take,” he quips, which makes Sandy shriek with laughter.

  “O-M-G, Jack, you are so funny!”

  Jack’s broad grin is widening as he indulges in Sandy’s appreciation of his unspeakable wit.

  Alfonso rolls his eyes at me, and I just shrug. I’m the last person anyone could accuse of cutting Jack Antonelli too much slack—he’s been my archnemesis for the better part of my life—but I do appreciate a good riposte.

  Some people can always come up with a snappy remark when the situation requires it, and I can see why many find this an endearing quality. Sadly, that kind of talent usually isn’t bestowed upon the most deserving individuals. I usually think of sharp, witty responses a few hours after I need them, and I have this theory that the world is in the sad state it’s in because all too often, people tend to succumb to the charm of the bully.

  “Anyway,” Jack says and looks at his watch, “if you girls don’t wanna be late on the first day, you better hurry up. Wanna catch a ride, Sandy?”

  She shakes her head and grabs my arm again. “That’s okay, I’ll walk with my homie Matt here.”

  Jack shrugs. “Suit yourself. I’ll see you later, girls!”

  We watch him take off, and still wiping my butt crack, I say, “So how bad is it?”

  Everyone takes a close look at my butt which is the last thing I would have expected—or asked for—on my first day of high school, and from their restrained reaction I can tell it’s probably not looking great.

  “To be honest,” Alfonso says, “it looks like a pretty bad case of diarrhea.”

  “Great,” I say. “Talk about making a splash on the first day of school.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The entrance hall of Brookhurst High School is abuzz with a throbbing mass of sneakers and backpacks, of T-shirts, hoodies, jeans, and skirts as a couple of hundred freshmen anticipate their first of roughly seven hundred days in high school with nervous excitement. As soon as we enter the hall we lose Sandy in the thick of it as she endeavors to hug everybody (and I do mean everybody) and tell them how much she’s been missing them over the summer. Streaming into the hall, the jumbling crowd crystallizes into eight semi-orderly queues, each one lining up for one of the tables set up against the wall opposite of the main entrance, and for a moment I’m not sure whether we’re starting high school or auditioning for American Idol.

  I sure hope it’s not American Idol, because I can’t sing to save my life.

  As Alfonso and I line up for one of the tables, he’s kind enough to stand about two inches behind me to shield the mud-streaked seat of my shorts from the prying eyes of my future fellow students. It takes us only about five minutes to realize that we’re standing in the wrong queue. Each of the tables caters to a range of letters, and neither Dunstan nor Alonso falls into the N - Q range we’re lined up for. We have to split up and each go to our assigned queues, so I’m standing alone in my queue now, moving forward at an agonizingly slow pace as my butt feels more self-conscious than ever and my ears miserably fail in their desperate bid to ignore the whispers and giggles. I can’t wait to get to my classroom so I can finally obscure my dirty behind from people’s view simply by sitting on it.

  Somewhere behind me someone bursts out laughing. When I look, heads quickly turn away, and I continue to let my eyes roam, pretending that whatever they were laughing about, it wasn’t me. Over in the K - M queue, Sandy is—I presume—trying out her rudimentary Mandarin skills on the bemused looking Korean dude in front of her. The guy standing right behind Sandy is wearing a black T-shirt that has the word Larsenist printed on it in big, bold, white letters. Aghast at this heinous act of orthographic deviancy yet intrigued by the audacity to put it so shamelessly on display on one’s first day at a new academic institution, I cannot help but take a closer look to find out what kind of person would be so daringly rebellious.

  The linguistic rogue in skinny jeans and black Chucks is tall and handsome. Around his suntanned neck a silver necklace is glistening in the bright halogen light of the entrance hall. On his head he’s sporting a tousled mop of strawberry blond hair that looks as if he’s come straight out of bed. He is—and I find this fact impossible to ignore—absolutely gorgeous.

  Also, he’s staring at me.

  The moment I look at his face I catch him staring at me with piercing, ocean-blue eyes and the subtlest of smiles. It’s a widely accepted and adhered to social standard that when you’re caught staring at someone, you immediately look away as if you were just looking at them by accident, so that’s what I do. I quickly, bashfully look away like some intimidated little puppy, my heart pounding in my chest, and my mind feeling like a tumble dryer.

  After a few seconds I turn my head to seek him out of the crowd again. His queue has moved forward, but when I finally find him he’s still staring at me, and when our eyes meet again his winks at me!

  What the heck is wrong with this guy?

  “Next, please!” I hear someone bark in my direction, and the guy behind me in the queue taps me on the shoulder. “That you.”

  “What?” I turn around, and to my surprise I look into the face of a middle-aged Asian man wearing a grubby gray jacket and a trilby hat. His face unshaven, his thick, black hair flecked with gray, he looks distinctly out of place here, and it suddenly occurs to me that all of this is probably just one of those bizarre dreams people keep having about school where weird and embarrassing things happen to them.

  I look at myself to check if I’m actually naked.

  Turns out I’m not.

  “You next,” the man says with an unnecessarily polite smile as he points at the table where a middle-aged woman is impatiently tapping her pen on a stack of manila envelopes.

  “Oh, right,” I say and step up to the table.

  The woman bears an uncanny resemblance to Kim Davis, the county clerk from Kentucky who recently rose to dubious national fame by denying marriage licenses to gay couples, citing her religious opposition to same-sex marriage.

  She looks at me over the rim of her glasses. “Name?”

  “Hi, I’m Matt.”

  “That’s great,” she says with no discernible expression on her round face. “And do you also have a last name, or are you just Matt?”

  “Oh,” I say, feeling like a stupid freshman.

  “Sorry. Dunstan. Matthew Dunstan.”

  “Dunstan,” she repeats and starts leafing through her stack of envelopes. When she finds the one with my name on it, she opens it and pulls out a few sheets of paper
and a small plastic card the size of a credit card with my picture on it that was taken when I enrolled at the school a couple of weeks ago. Her eyes bounce back and forth between the picture and my face until she’s satisfied that I’m actually who I claim to be.

  As if someone would actually try to con their way into high school.

  “Bad hair day?” she finally asks.

  I nervously scratch the back of my head. “Yeah, I … got a haircut just before that picture was taken, and it didn’t quite come out the way—”

  “No, I mean today.”

  My hand stops scratching, and I wonder is a pair of red-hot glowing ears can actually set off the fire alarm.

  That would be helpful.

  I could just turn around and run.

  But I can’t, obviously.

  I’m caught in a trap, and it must be the weirdest trap anyone has ever been caught in, with a strange, trilby-wearing Asian man standing behind me, a breathtakingly attractive guy probably still staring at my reddened face, hundreds of freshmen smirking at my mud-streaked shorts, and Kim Davis, her mouth moving and moving but none of her words reaching my burning ears, handing me a whole bunch of papers, one after the other, none of which, I assume, is a marriage license because even though gay marriage is now legal, God still hates fags.

  “Hello?” she suddenly shouts at me, prompting me to snap out of my stupor.

  “Sorry, what?”

  “I said: do you have any questions?”

  “Um,” I say. “Not right now, I don’t think.”

  “Good. Next!”

  When I turn to leave, looking at the stack of papers in my hand, I bump into the Asian man behind me as he steps up to the table.

  “Ah! Sorry, sorry,” he apologizes overly politely and bows.

  “Sorry,” I utter absent-mindedly and scurry away in an attempt to not draw any more attention toward myself.

  Making my way across the hall I look at the K - N queue, but the Larsenist is gone. I scan the crowd, but to my great disappointment I can’t find him anywhere. Instead, I see Alfonso and Zoey standing by the glass door to the hallway, waving me over. When I reach them, Zoey raises her eyebrows expectantly.

  “So?” she asks.

  I frown. “So what?”

  “So who’s your homeroom teacher?”

  “Oh,” I say and start clumsily leafing through my stack of papers. I don’t even know what they all are. Taking a pity on me, Zoey plunges her hand into the sea of papers and pulls out my class schedule with impeccable accuracy. She looks at it.

  “Mrs. Spelczik. English. Room 201. Second floor.”

  She pronounces the name spellchick.

  With a wide grin I nudge Alfonso. “Awesome name for an English teacher, huh? Spell chick, get it?”

  He looks at me with a deadpan face. “Dude, seriously?”

  “Never mind,” I say, making a mental note not to speak unless I’m spoken to first.

  For the next four years.

  “This way, guys,” Zoey says, pushing the door open as I look back across the hall, hoping to catch another glimpse of the Larsenist. “If you’re looking for the limpet, she’s already on her way up.”

  I shake my head. “No, I was just … never mind. And could you stop calling her limpet?”

  “And why would I do that?”

  “Because she’s not a limpet.”

  “Well,” Zoey says, “she’s certainly clinging to you like one.”

  “That’s obviously not true, because then she’d be here right now, wouldn’t she?”

  “Aw,” she teases me. “You miss her already. That is so sweet.”

  “I … what?! No! I don’t miss her at all! What are you talking about?”

  “Matt, it’s okay. You don’t have to be shy. I’m your sister, Alfonso’s your best friend. You can tell us. You can tell us everything.”

  “Tell you what exactly?”

  “I don’t know, you tell me.”

  “You two,” Alfonso says, absentmindedly shaking his head as he’s scrolling through the Twitter feed on his phone. “I don’t know what it is, but you’re acting all weird today.”

  “We’re siblings,” I say. “We act all weird every day.”

  “Not like that, though.”

  When we’ve reached room 201, Zoey stops and turns to me. “Okay, this is you. I’ll see you in four years. Have fun. And try to remain seated, because it really looks like you’ve pooped your pants.”

  “Thanks, Zoey,” I sigh.

  “All right,” Alfonso says. “Let’s do this.”

  I follow him into our classroom. Of the thirty or so desks, about two thirds are already taken by our new classmates. I recognize a handful of them, most notably Jack and his sidekick Steve Henderson sitting at the back of the room, reclining in their chairs, their arms crossed, watching us enter the classroom like I assume Roman emperors must have been watching Christians being led into the Colosseum before the lions were let loose.

  I don’t have an affectionate nickname for Steve Henderson.

  That’s because I have no affection for Steve Henderson.

  Alfonso nudges me with his elbow and nods toward a couple of empty desks in the middle of the room. As I take my seat, I hear Jack say, “Look at the panty pooper,” prompting Steve to laugh like a horse. Trying not to die of embarrassment I turn my attention toward the front of the room where Sandy and her new Korean friend enter.

  “Sandy! Over here!”

  I wave at her and point at the single empty desk on my right. Sandy and the Korean guy make their way over and then walk right past me to sit behind Alfonso and me, leaving my right flank exposed and vulnerable.

  As the rest of our new classmates keep trickling through the door and filling up the remaining desks, the one next to me is one of the few that remain empty until the very last.

  Nobody wants to sit next to a panty pooper.

  All of a sudden, the Larsenist is standing in the door, setting off bonfires in my chest, and I find myself sitting up straight and trying to look as tall as I can without standing up.

  After a quick scan of the room, he walks straight over to the empty desk next to me, drops his backpack on the floor and sits down. He turns to me, still with that subtle smile on his suntanned face, reaches his hand out to me and says, “Hi. I’m Chris Larsen.”

  Of course you are, I’m thinking. You’re also gorgeous. Can I sit on your lap?

  Trying hard not to make a complete fool of myself, I act all cool, shake his hand and say, “Matt. Matt Dunstan.”

  “Nice to meet you, Matt-Matt Dunstan,” he says, and I’m melting away at the electrifying touch of his hand and the sound of his silky voice saying my name.

  My name sounds really nice when a cute guy says it.

  I want him to say it again.

  I want him to say anything to me, really, so I’m about to pay him a petty compliment on his T-shirt and how Larsenist is such a clever pun on his name, when all of a sudden a voice from behind cuts my pathetic attempts to suck up to what must be the most gorgeous guy in this school painfully short.

  “Chris Larsen, is that you?”

  We both turn around, and my heart sinks like a rock to the bottom of the Mariana Trench as I look into the pimply, beaming face of the Jackrabbit.

  “Oh my God, Jack!” Chris exclaims with heartbreaking excitement. He gets up from his seat and walks to the back.

  Meanwhile at the front, a woman in her forties enters the room. “Good morning, everyone,” she says as she walks to her desk.

  Chris briefly returns to his desk—or his former desk I should say because he’s just come to pick up his backpack. “See you around, Matt-Matt Dunstan,” he whispers and winks at me again before he gets back to the back of the room where he goes to sit with Jack.

  “Made up our mind back there, have we?” Mrs. Spelczik asks in Chris’s direction.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Chris says. “I’m all good.”

  As Mrs. Spelczik, aft
er introducing herself, starts droning about school and classroom rules, about discipline and diligence, about homework, exams, and assignments, my thoughts keep drifting back to the boy who’s sitting three rows behind me at the back of the room. Occasionally I cast a surreptitious glance at him, and whenever I do that I catch him and Jack whisper and giggle like a bunch of giddy little girls. At one point Mrs. Spelczik chides them for disruptive behavior, and for a moment I’m hoping she might break up the two chatterboxes and make Chris sit with me again, but of course I have no such luck coming my way today, and the two keep whispering and giggling, leaving me to wallow in my petty jealousy.

  * * *

  “Man, these are all crap,” Alfonso says. He’s sitting opposite me at a table in the school cafeteria, skimming the list of extracurriculars that Mrs. Spelczik handed to us, urging us to sign up for at least one of them because it’ll look good on our college applications. “Model United Nations, Philosophy, Robotics … I mean, come on!”

  “No fruit picking?” I ask.

  “Funny,” he says with a wry smile. “Any idea what you want to go for?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe journalism.”

  “Well, you do like writing, so that would be good.”

  “Yeah.”

  It will be especially useful when I apply for the position of Senior Gay Reporter at the New York Times.

  Alfonso keeps going through the list until his face finally brightens up. “Hey,” he says, “they have Entrepreneurship! That’s about starting a business, not taking over an existing one, but still.”

  “Even if you take over your dad’s business, you might still want to start a new one one day. Besides, it will look good on your college application regardless, if you want to study business management or whatever.”

  “I guess,” Alfonso says. He puts the list aside and grabs the juice box from his tray.

  “Hey, guys.”

  Sandy and her new friend approach our table, both holding their lunch trays. “Can we sit with you?”

  “Sure,” I say, and Alfonso nods, sucking on his straw.

  Together they go to sit next to Alfonso on the opposite side of the table. “So guys, this is Jason Dong. Jason, these are Matt and Alfonso. We’ve known each other, like, since kindergarten.”