“Three years?”
“Maybe longer. I think I liked you in middle school, too—although it’s kind of an obsessive blur.”
I stared at Tegan, completely open-mouthed. It was a miracle my tongue wasn’t lolling out like a banana slug.
“What I’m trying to say is: Yes, I’m bisexual. But I’m also sooooooo overwhelmingly Cliffsexual, it kind of overrides everything else.” Tegan paused before adding, “I guess you’re asking this to see if I want to go to the GSA meeting with you?”
With that, Tegan and I had a destination.
“Can I ask you a weird question?” said Tegan.
I looked at Tegan.
“Back when I”—she rolled her eyes—“flirted with you…I didn’t make you feel uncomfortable, did I?”
“Uncomfortable?”
“It’s just…my cousin, Madeliene, is always on Facebook, talking about how men either treat women like sex objects or they body-shame them, and it made me think of how I catcalled you, and how it mighta made you feel like an object or like I was making fun of your body, but honestly, I was just a dummy who didn’t know how to express my feelings for you, so I did what I always saw Frankie doing to girls, which is stupid. Anyway, if I ever made you feel uncomfortable, I’m really sorry.”
“Tegan?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.”
Tegan smiled bashfully—blushed, even—although she attempted to hide the evidence by popping her jacket collar and sinking her head into her shoulders.
“Don’t look at me,” she said.
“Are you blushing?”
“Dammit, I said don’t look at me!”
I laughed, Tegan blushed even harder, and she shoved me—which only seemed to feed the cycle of laughing and blushing. Although both of our reactions faded in the wake of room 206. I heard voices coming from the open doorway.
“You need to get out,” said a voice that was definitely Noah.
“But I thought anyone was invited,” said a voice that was definitely Esther. “We just want to hear what you have to say. Isn’t that right, everyone?”
There was a roar of a response—cheers and laughter and one very distinguished homophobic slur. This only fed the laughter.
Tegan and I rounded the corner and stepped inside. There was Noah. And Esther. And all fifty-something members of the JTs, occupying the space like it was Wall Street.
My jaw disconnected.
“The fuck is this?” said Tegan.
Esther looked at her and shrugged innocently. “Well, it’s supposed to be a Gay-Straight Alliance. Personally, I came to educate myself on the ways in which straights and gays can maintain peaceful relations. But I’ll tell ya, I’ve felt nothing but discrimination!”
Noah was standing rigid at the head of the classroom. His arms were straight metal rods, clear to his iron-knob fists.
“I mean, was there a dress code that I missed?” said Esther. “Let me guess: leather chaps and those cute little Chippendale cuffs?”
“If you don’t get out…” said Noah, his voice a warning.
Esther widened her eyes at me, faux-appalled, and gestured at Noah. “Are you hearing this, Cliff? You know, it’s a wonder he’s not on the List. You and Aaron should look into that. Make sure you guys didn’t miss something.” Her gaze shifted past me to the doorway. “Oh, hey, company!”
Tegan and I turned around. There was Robin Dunston—standing small in the doorway, clutching her purse tight in front of her. Her entire frame seemed to shrink, as if she were trying to take up as little space as possible. Frankly, I was surprised to see her, after what the JTs did.
But not nearly as surprised as I was to see her big brother, Kyle Dunston, behind her.
He did not look happy.
“No way!” said Zeke. His lanky frame was wedged awkwardly in a tablet arm desk, his legs kicked up on the surface. He was practically folded in half. “Kyle, are you into dudes? I should let you know, I don’t give it on the first date.”
Kyle marched right up to Zeke’s desk. Zeke seemed to realize his mistake. Unfortunately, he was also folded like a lawn chair. Kyle shoved the entire desk-chair combo over, with Zeke still in it. Naturally, Zeke screamed like the backup singer of a bad emo song. The surrounding JTs scattered like ants in a disturbed anthill.
“Mess with my sister again, and I’ll kill you,” said Kyle. With that, he started for the door. “We’re going, Robin.”
Robin—still standing silently in the doorway—nodded. Together, they disappeared out the door.
That was the last brick in Noah’s crumbling resolve. He didn’t last ten seconds before he exited after them.
Tegan and I reluctantly followed.
Behind us, cheers erupted in unsettling victory.
The next day, I discovered a small gift in my locker—an unlabeled DVD, accompanied by a most peculiar note:
Use this against Esther at the Sermon Showdown.
—HAL
If there was any doubt that Shane’s secret girlfriend—the mysterious Haley—dropped the journal off at my house, it was gone now. For whatever reason, she was reaching out to me.
But that was a rather trivial observation compared to how badly I needed to watch this DVD right now.
“Aaron! Aaron! Aaron!”
I ran and screamed all the way over to Aaron’s locker—which was only eleven units away on the opposite wall. He eyed me with savage skepticism.
“If Tegan bank-robbed your virginity last night,” said Aaron, “you really don’t need to lather me in the details.”
I took the DVD with the note Scotch-taped to its blank surface and shoved it in Aaron’s face. “Read this.”
Aaron reared his head back defensively. He grabbed the DVD and read. “Holy shitballs.”
We didn’t even need to say anything to each other. We turned and sprinted in the direction of Mr. Gibson’s computer lab.
I always just figured Jack and Julian lived in the computer lab—like the Boxcar Children, but nerdier. No home, no normal school classes—they were just these computer-nerd orphans who were capable of skipping so many grades, the school district tossed up their hands in exasperation, and threw them in the computer lab, and said, “Okay, nerd-orphans, teach yourselves.”
Much to my disbelief, as Aaron and I entered the computer lab, Jack and Julian were nowhere to be seen.
But the lab wasn’t empty. Mr. Gibson’s computer lab was occupied by none other than Mr. Gibson.
If I were to describe Mr. Gibson in three words, those three words would be frazzled and awkward and mustached. Of those three adjectives, mustached would be his primary personality trait. He groomed that thing like it was a Kentucky Derby racehorse. It was the source of all his confidence—which was a tragedy, really, because the thing looked ridiculous.
The tardy bell rang.
“Can I help you boys?” said Mr. Gibson.
“We just wanted to watch a movie,” I said.
Aaron elbowed me. “An educational movie,” he said.
“Y-y-y-yeah,” I stammered. “For school.”
“Our teacher is giving us the period to research.”
“Huh,” said Mr. Gibson. “Well, knock yourselves out. Username and password is the same as your student e-mail.”
We complied—sitting together at the computer farthest from Mr. Gibson.
Aaron inserted the mystery DVD in the disk drive. It opened in the default media player, and I pressed Play.
The video opened to the setup of a porno.
Okay, technically it was a desktop webcam view of Esther Poulson’s bedroom. Zeke Gallagher was guest-starring, wearing nothing but gym shorts—spread-eagled, back exposed, wrists tied to the sturdy curtain rod of Esther’s bedroom window. Esther, meanwhile, was holding an honest-to-god tasseled whip.
“Why are you being punished?” said Esther.
“I…I keep having impure thoughts,” said Zeke.
Esther whipped
Zeke’s back. He yelped—although there seemed to be a fine line between pain and excitement.
“No. Way,” said Aaron.
Esther lifted the tasseled whip to her nose and smelled it like a bouquet. “Mmm. Just impure thoughts?”
“No,” said Zeke. “I masturbated to your family vacation pictures. You were wearing a red swimsuit with white polka dots.”
“How many times did you masturbate to those pictures?”
“Nineteen. Nineteen times.”
“Christ on a Triscuit!” I said.
“Nineteen times.” Esther shook her head, tsk-tsking. She whipped him again.
“Ohhhhh,” said Zeke. “Ohhhhhhhhhhh.”
There wasn’t an inch of his body that wasn’t totally enjoying this.
“Tell me what you want,” said Esther.
“I want your body,” said Zeke.
Esther whipped him again. Zeke howled so loud, I felt embarrassed for everyone in the neighborhood.
“Well, you can’t have it,” she said. “My body is a temple.”
Again with the whip.
“AHHHHHHHHHH.”
“Judas Priest!” said Mr. Gibson from his far corner of the computer lab. “What the heck are you boys watching?”
“Uh…” I said.
“Um…” said Aaron.
“Er…” I said.
We ejected the disk and ran like hell.
So, just to recap, HAL gave us a Puritan-style dominatrix-BDSM pseudo-porno starring Esther Poulson and Zeke Gallagher. The only thing missing was gift wrap and a literal silver platter.
At first, I thought it was homemade. But considering this was HAL we were dealing with, I wondered if maybe she’d hacked Esther’s computer webcam. It was, after all, slightly off center, and neither Esther nor Zeke paid the camera any heed—highly unusual for their level of narcissism.
After school, we drove to Aaron’s house where we rewatched the video in its kinky entirety—this time within the privacy of his bikini-clad bedroom. It lasted a grueling twenty-three minutes, and Esther never gave Zeke any. Unless “any” was a raging boner.
The video ended on its own, rather than being turned off by Esther—solid evidence that HAL hacked the shit out of Esther’s webcam.
Aaron and I leaned back in our chairs and processed exactly what it was we had in our possession.
“This would destroy Esther,” said Aaron.
“Yes,” I said, nodding definitively. “Yes, it would.”
“What do you think? Can we use this?”
“Can we? Or should we?”
“Um…either?”
I sighed. “Would it sound stupid if I said I felt wrong about using this?”
The words already sounded stupid coming out of my mouth. Esther and Zeke totally deserved this. After the stunt they pulled with Robin and the GSA meeting, this was karma at its best.
“No, I agree,” said Aaron.
“What? You do?”
“Well, number five on the List is ‘Find and stop HAL.’ So if we’re firing the ammunition that HAL gives us, we’re kind of doing the exact opposite of that.”
Yes. There was also that.
“So I guess that means we’re back to square one with the Sermon Showdown?” I said.
“Bro,” said Aaron. “We’re at square zero. Maybe in the square negatives.”
There was something of a paradigmal shift in the Hubbard household. It mostly involved my mom not putting up with my dad’s shit anymore, and my dad not knowing what to do about it. He was acting more and more like the paranoid weasel captain of a mutinying ship. She stopped buying his beer when she went grocery shopping, she stopped making him dinner, she even stopped doing his laundry. She would actually physically separate his laundry from hers in their shared hamper, do her laundry (and mine), and leave his dirty clothes in a pile on the floor.
At first there was yelling. But then it was discovered that my mom could scream even louder than my dad—hitting ungodly vocal frequencies—with the added bonus of portraying a certain Helena Bonham Carter level of psychoticism.
Basically, I was eyeballs deep in tension. Eight hundred square feet of Marital Battlezone.
I had been waiting my whole life for this insurrection. But now that it was happening, I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I pulled a notebook and a freshly sharpened pencil out of my backpack, opened to a blank sheet of paper, and wrote Sermon Showdown. I underlined it.
I stared at the stretch of infinite white beneath that line. It was a blizzard—vast and impenetrable. My pencil hovered over the storm. Trembled in the wake of its pale fury.
My resolve crumbled within five minutes. I retreated to my bookshelf of movies, grabbed a Lord of the Rings DVD—I didn’t even pay attention to which one—and inserted it in the DVD player.
Orcs and Dark Lords aside, Middle-Earth just seemed a lot friendlier place than real life.
I hate the phrase life goes on.
I mean, sure it does, technically speaking—but it doesn’t always go on the way that it’s supposed to. Like, if a nuclear reactor melts down, and Earth is showered in fallout, yeah, life will go on—with Siamese vegetables, two-headed super-rats, and the mutant cast of The Hills Have Eyes.
After the JTs’ initial victory over the GSA, school went on, so to speak. Everyone was rushing to their lockers, rushing to their friends, rushing to their classes. Noah, however, was an effigy—a stationary monument representing the pinnacle of suck. He was partially hidden at the end of a row of lockers, leaning into the nook, staring at his phone. It looked like he was texting—or trying to, at least. The words in his head seemed to experience difficulty traveling to his thumbs.
“Hey there, lover boy,” said Roy Porter—not only a JT, but also a VIP member of the football douchebag clique. I assumed he was a lineman, based on his physique, which resembled a two-hundred-pound bipedal frog. “Who ya textin’?”
Noah glanced up, deadpan, and said, “Your mom.”
Apparently, Roy didn’t expect the tables to turn so quickly, because he immediately took the defensive. “Hey, don’t you dare talk about my mama.”
“I’m not talking about her. We’re just having sex.”
Hooooooo boy. Noah was definitely having a bad day, because he never shit-talked like this.
“You goddamn queer!”
“Hey, it’s cool,” said Noah. “If I become your stepdad, you don’t have to call me Dad. ‘Sir’ will suffice.”
Either Noah had overestimated his luck, or he didn’t give a shit. (Most likely the latter.) Roy lunged at Noah, fists tight.
I intervened like a freight train.
I didn’t attack Roy, per se. I just sort of speed-walked into him. He bounced off my gut and into the nearest locker.
“What the HEY-ell?” he said, unleashing the Gift of Tongues in true redneck form. “Why you lousy piece o—!”
Roy regained his balance, pulled his fists into orbit, took one step toward me, and then his spine bent backward as he absorbed me in my tsunamic entirety.
“—Hoooooooly shit,” he concluded. He took a step backward and sized me up, from my head to my size-fourteen sneakers. “Damn, you’re big. Why ain’t you on the football team?”
“I don’t like football,” I said.
“Huh,” said Roy. “Well that’s a damn shame.” He slowly backed away, but not before pointing a threatening finger at Noah. “I’m not through with you, Poulson.”
“Yes, you are,” I said.
Roy looked at me, mouth ajar. His pointed finger hung awkwardly in the air. He moved his finger uncertainly, like a drunk magician.
And then he shuffled away.
I glanced at Noah. His mouth was small and tight, and his eyes were hard. He looked anything but grateful. “I don’t need you to protect me, Cliff.”
“Oh, don’t worry, I walked into him by accident. Nothing personal.”
Noah’s mouth flinched—almost a smile.
“Hey,” I said
. “Sorry about the other day.”
“It’s okay, Cliff,” he said. Even though it very clearly wasn’t.
“So what’s the plan?”
“The plan?”
“You know. For the GSA.”
Noah shrugged. “There is no plan.”
“You mean, you don’t know where to move it?”
“I mean, I don’t know what would be the point of moving it.”
I stared at Noah. Waited for the smirk that indicated he was just messing with me. Of course there was a point! Noah had only spent his entire high school career working for this.
The smirk never came.
“Suppose I move it,” said Noah. “What then? The JTs will just crash the new location. Suppose there are others like Robin? The JTs will just harass them, too—make their lives a living hell—and they’ll have nowhere to go.”
“So you’re giving up?” I said. “Everything you’ve worked for—you’re just gonna throw that out the window?”
“I don’t know, Cliff!” Noah’s voice was a crack of thunder. “I just…I need time to think.”
Noah pushed past me and walked away, plunging himself into the crowd.
A blur in the chaos.
Gone.
I found Tegan in the Quad, nonchalantly spying on the JTs. She was leaning, James Dean–style, against the wall, thumbs in her belt loops, aggressively chewing a piece of bubble gum.
Okay, so spying was a loose term. It indicated she was trying not to be seen when, in reality, Tegan was the most visible thing in a hundred-foot radius. Even with Esther spewing her usual fire and brimstone.
Tegan blew a bubble half the size of her head. It popped loudly, and somehow managed to get back in her mouth without swallowing her face.
“Bubble gum?” I said.
“When I don’t smoke pot, I smoke cigarettes,” said Tegan. “Except I quit smoking when I was fourteen. Saw this documentary in Health about lung cancer. Scared the livin’ fuck outta me. But I need to keep my mouth busy. Therefore, bubble gum.”
“Ah.”
“Want some? It’s Bubble Yum. Cotton candy flavor.”
“No thanks.”
Neanderthal Opens the Door to the Universe Page 24