Misconception

by Ryan Boudinot

  "He broke your arm? You never told me that. What happened?"

  "I can't."

  We were surrounded by the smell of scorched meat. Semis barreled by on the freeway. Kat asked me to watch for Jerry's van and let her know when it was gone. I peered around the corner and saw Jerry climb slowly back into his vehicle. He sat with his hands on the steering wheel and slowly let his head sag forward until it rested against the soiled sheepskin cover. I watched him cry but couldn't hear him. I heard Kat crying but was afraid to look at her.

  As Kat's Alaskan voyage approached, summer grew dense with its anxieties. Dusk, in bed, I listened to my parents' muffled, pained conversation through the wall, my mother's voice a warble of concern, my father's cagy and evasive, while I absentmindedly felt myself through my pajamas. They were arguing something fierce. Something about my dad being disbarred. Something about a client. Mother-made noises on the precipice of tears, a sworn word. As far as I could tell, the culture of the courtroom inspired only nausea for my father anymore. He'd had a string of bad cases, each loss compounding his fear that his own shortcomings, not justice, were to blame. He admitted that he arrived at court ill-prepared, delivered his arguments poorly, blew openings in cross-examination, hesitated to raise objections, suffered from bowelchurning prehearing anxiety. The judges were sanctimonious pricks, prosecutors appeared gleeful when they saw him on defense, and the criminals he represented were ungrateful and deserving of sentences far harsher than they received. He'd quit the whole thing, he said, turn his back on the catastrophe of his career and raise llamas. As they argued, the correlation presented itself more acutely: my father and the very idea of justice were both failures.

  I didn't want to end up like my dad. I needed a plan. Days later, at dinner, I announced that I would throw myself into my schoolwork the following year and get the grades necessary for admission to an Ivy League university. I translated their masticating grunts to mean they'd believe it when they saw it, or maybe they were reacting not to what I'd said, but merely to the fact I had spoken.

  My mother, meanwhile, was enjoying a sort of career renaissance. She'd been contacted by a notable publisher who wanted to use some of her photos in a new physiology text. One night, while studying her hematoma series, I asked her why anatomy and physiology were separate areas of study, why they weren't combined. She explained that anatomy was about forms, connections, components. Physiology, concerning the functions of these forms, existed within anatomy. More granular still were histology, biochemistry, and molecular biology, each subject cradled within the others until human knowledge ultimately yielded to the mysteries of subatomic particles. You could look at individual human beings as if through a microscope, she explained, adjusting the magnification to capture the whole body, the pumping heart, a cell within the heart, an organelle within the cell, a molecule within the organelle.

  That night, in the fuzzy-edged haze after masturbation, I adjusted this theoretical microscope in the other direction, thinking about bodies as members of families, cultures, races, species. Psychology, sociology, anthropology. Here was the plane on which my father struggled, wrestling meaning and consequence from the troubles these bodies put themselves in. In bed, with cold spunk pooling in my belly button, I consciously witnessed my brain opening its awareness more fully to the world. I thought about the years ahead of me as if they were laid out in a gigantic calendar with squares of days teeming with life, cities, sex, flocks of birds, knowledge. I became aware that I was maturing, as freighted as the word was with uninspired, health-class baggage. I needed a long-term plan. I cleaned up with a tissue and walked from my room through the house to my mother's study. Books lined most of one wall, reference volumes and textbooks, neural science, organic chemistry, orthopedic physical assessment, pathology, pharmacology. If I began now, I'd have a head start for medical school. I looked for all the textbooks that had the word introduction in the title and carried them back to my room. There began my teenage preoccupation with my mother's medical library, getting comfortable with my inability to comprehend most of it, savoring the reward of occasional understanding. I was determined to be a doctor. I was going to save lives.

  I counted the days until Kat's month-long boat trip on one hand. When either of us broached the subject, the conversation turned to enumerating George's faults and hypocri sies, and together we developed his malignant caricature. She described a daydream in which George's house, five minutes from her own, unmoored itself from its foundation and crawled through the intervening neighborhoods leaving a swath of smashed cars, flattened house pets, and uprooted landscaping. Kat imagined opening her door and finding George's house sitting in their front yard, its peeling siding heaving from the effort. She showed me a drawing from her notebook, in which his house was mounting hers, while a terrified-looking Kat peered from her bedroom window.

  I said good-bye to Kat at the pier at dawn. George and Veronica finished loading the boat and chuckled to each other at the melodrama of our tearful farewell. I watched the hot pink sky swallow them with its horizon. I pedaled home and found my house overcome with the flamboyance of scotch broom, blooming in the ditch by our side yard. My father never failed to point out that this plant was a weed, but my mom liked it, and put cuttings of it on the dining room table when it bloomed. I fused these objects of memory together into a sort of collage: sailboat, scotch broom, pink sky. I went to my bedroom and commenced a month-long memory lapse. I imagine I mowed lawns, watched movies and TV, went to the mall and the park, hung out with Paul, threw away my cigarettes, ate dinner, rode my bike, listened to my Walkman, but I don't remember any of it.

  The month passed and Kat called, her voice nasal with a cold. She said something blunt and unenthusiastic like, "I'm back," then doled out little dribbles of answers as I asked about different parts of the trip. "By the way," she said, "George proposed to my mom."

  The next day at Fat's house her mother was already in the process of packing their belongings to move to George's house. They needed to get out before the end of August to avoid another month's rent. Kat sat in her room, skin peeling on an eroded tan, systematically pulling elastic fibers from a sock.

  "How was the trip?" I said.

  "Fine. We sailed."

  "How far did you get?"

  "Port Hardy."

  "What was it like?"

  "Boring."

  "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing."

  I attributed her mood to the engagement, or to my new unified theory of female moods: menses. Over the next week Kat refused to call me. I had to call her if I wanted to talk. We went to a movie and she made some unenthused attempts at making out with me, but I could tell she wasn't into it. We walked to my house along the train tracks, past our old school. She wrestled her hand out of mine, annoyed. My default question was to ask what was wrong, every ten minutes or so. We devolved into a fight over something ridiculous and she turned around and walked back to her place.

  Later that night she broke her phone embargo, whispering over the line. She said her period was late.

  "What's that mean?" I said.

  "You're the medical guy. Look it up in one of your stupid books," she said, then hung up.

  I quickly consulted Introduction to Human Reproductivity, 3rd ed., and discovered that Kat may have had any number of disorders, was training for a triathalon, or was pregnant. I called her back.

  "How late is it? Sometimes you can miss a period and it's no big deal, it just happens. Like it happens to women who exercise a lot. Have you ever missed a period before? When was it supposed to be? Do you know when you ovulated?"

  A door squeaked open in the background. Behind Kat's breathing, George said, "If you're gonna use my phone, you're going to have to obey some guidelines. No calls after nine PM, little miss."

  "This isn't even your phone," Kat said.

  "Well it's about to be."

  Kat's voice wavered. "I have to go."

  My room, a ten-by-twelve space contai
ning the shit of my life, appeared to contract and expand with my breath. I crawled onto my bed and stared at the blobby patterns of painted-over, texturizing spackle on the wall, trying to find geographies in it. This blob looked a little like Africa. Pregnant? I wanted to do something physical, go ride my bike, mow a lawn, but segments of time had begun to compound one another, steadily gaining mass, pinning me to my bed. My mom appeared in the doorway after the perfunctory knock.

  "Hey buddy, we have ice cream. Want some?"

  "No."

  "What's the matter?"

  "Why do you always think something's wrong?"

  "You're lying in your bed fully clothed with your nose against the wall."

  I didn't say anything.

  "It's Neapolitan. We saved the strawberry stripe for you."

  "I said I didn't want any."

  My mother sat down on the edge of my bed and stroked my foot.

  "Knock it off," I said.

  "Your parents are about the last people on earth you want to spend time with," said my mom. "Trust me, I know. I've been there. I just want you to be able to talk to us about whatever's on your mind."

  "Kat broke up with me," I said without thinking. Brilliant. Now if they heard me crying in my room they'd assume it was for typical adolescent reasons.

  "Oh no. I'm sorry, Cedar. That's rough. It really is," she said, then added, "The ice cream is in the freezer when you want it, okay sweetie?"

  I started crying as soon as my mother left, but not because of what had happened to Kat. I hadn't begun to grasp the borders of that enormous and terrifying fact. I cried because I wanted my mom to hold me and press my face into her gaudy bead necklace. I couldn't trust my parents to guide me through this, but I couldn't remember a time when I'd needed them more.

  I recreated every sexual event Kat and I had shared and tried to recall even a droplet of semen getting near her. I'd never penetrated her or even ejaculated in her presence. The blow jobs had been pantomimes of sexual pleasure in which I'd lied and said it was possible for a guy to come without anything coming out. I had yet to figure out how sex was even really supposed to feel. So there was no way it was me. It had to be someone else. Was it George? I played with this idea for a while, sort of examined it from a distance like I was holding a blob of toxic goo in front of the on a stick. If I called Kat to ask if this was the case, George might answer. A dark canyon of hatred split me down the middle. And yet I worried I was being overly dramatic. How was I supposed to behave with Kat now? What encouraging dialogue was I supposed to deliver to fulfill my role as a supportive boyfriend? What if Kat decided to keep the baby and I entered my freshman year of high school with everyone thinking I was a dad? I played another scenario, some kind of sad, bargain-basement wedding with a white sheet cake from Safeway and somebody from Kat's church playing a piano. Paul as best man, ludicrous. Quitting school to get a job. Eventually becoming the manager of a chain store at the mall. Maybe they could do some kind of DNA test to show that the baby wasn't mine. Fuck, Kat was about to go live with George. Was she planning to tell her mom? I vomited that night's fried chicken dinner into my wastebasket, hacking to encourage its passage from my throat.

  The next morning, fog and spider webs covered the neighborhood. I called Kat on a gas station pay phone and arranged to meet her that afternoon at the mall food court. We sat in the most secluded booth we could find, next to a gigantic pot full of plastic plants.

  "He did it, didn't he?" I said.

  "Who?" Kat said, staring at the entrance of the arcade.

  "It was just you three on the boat, right? You didn't meet anyone else on the way?"

  "No."

  "Then it must be George."

  "I don't want to talk about it."

  "What are you going to do? Have you taken one of those tests?"

  "No."

  "Don't you think you should?"

  "I guess."

  "What if you really are pregnant? What are you going to do?"

  "I don't know."

  I delivered a line from TV, "Kat, It's not your fault."

  "Whatever, Cedar."

  "I'm trying to help. I don't know what I'm supposed to do in this situation."

  "Maybe I actually should get one of those tests. Will you get it for me?" Kat pulled herself open a tiny bit and showed me something frightened, then quickly closed up again. I dragged a cold French fry through a patch of ketchup.

  Later, we rode our bikes to a Texaco station mini-mart. Kat hung out by the air and water and agreed to ring the bell on her bike three times if she saw someone we knew. The birth control devices and pregnancy tests were kept behind the counter, alongside the pornography and cigarettes, a logical grouping of products. I didn't want to seem like I just wanted to buy the pregnancy test, so I put a pack of Big Red on the counter. The Hispanic guy at the register rang it up.

  "And I'd like a pregnancy test, too, please."

  "Sure thing, boss. What kind you want?"

  "Whichever one is cheapest. And can I have that in a bag?"

  "No problem, boss. You take care now."

  Outside I got back on my bike. As we pedaled away from the station I hit a patch of oil and my bike skidded out from under me and slammed into the ice cooler. The pregnancy test and the Big Red went flying. Kat helped pull me up.

  "You got it really bad on your elbow," she gasped. I took a look and thought I saw bone. Woozy, I leaned against the side of the building while Kat found some paper towels. The cashier had witnessed the whole thing and came out to ask if I was okay. I waved him off like it was no big deal. Meanwhile, a truck pulled up to the pump and ran over the pregnancy test.

  "Oh, man," the cashier said, "I'd give you a free 'nother one but my boss gets pissed off if inventory doesn't match up."

  "Do you have any money?" I asked Kat.

  She opened her purse, extracted a couple bills, and handed them over.

  We agreed that revealing the results of the test over the phone was too risky. We'd meet at the swings at our old school the following morning and she'd tell me personally. That night a summer storm rolled over town and the next morning it was still raining hard. Drenched, I rode my bike to the playground and huddled inside a half buried tractor tire to stay out of the rain. Some kid had been here recently, and left a pile of grapes in the gravel. I made sure my bike was in view so Kat would know I was here, but after an hour she still hadn't showed up. I considered waiting the whole day, and pictured myself shivering, peering out the tight, sphincter-like opening of my hooded sweatshirt. I lasted another fifteen minutes. I rode half an hour to Kat's house and found the driveway empty. A few knocks on the door convinced me the place was empty. I took the front door key from under a decorative fake rock and went inside.

  There were cardboard boxes stacked in the front hall and in the living room were piles of pathetic-looking bric- a-brac. The kitchen was an even bigger mess. I grabbed a stray granola bar and surveyed the fridge, its sorrowful museum of condiments. I picked up an envelope of photos and rifled through them. The Alaska vacation fanned out in swaths of green and blue. Lots of George smiling in sunglasses and a floppy hat, Windbreaker, cargo shorts, and athletic socks. Every shot of George and Veronica with their arms around each other was headless; I smiled realizing this was Kat's private revenge. There was one picture of the three of them standing on a dock, all of them beaming. It surprised me to see Kat looking so happy. In another picture Kat was reading a book in the cabin, then listening to her Walkman, then asleep with a shaft of sun falling across her face. I stashed this one in my pocket. I stared hard at a picture of George, trying to summon the loathing I knew I was supposed to feel. He fucked her. I whispered the words slowly, "He ... fucked ... her ..." to see if I could get any closer to what they meant.

  Upstairs, I looked into the bathroom trash for any trace of the pregnancy test, but found only a wadded piece of toilet paper, a Band-Aid wrapper, a Q-tip globbed with ear wax. Kat's room was trashed, posters torn down, c
lothes and plastic jewelry strewn; I couldn't tell whether this was the result of moving, a tantrum, or maybe both. I buried my face in her bed sheets and inhaled. Then I reached under her pillow and found her journal.

  What did I want to believe? Whether or not I opened the book hinged on the question. Oddly, the possibility that George molested her was not as horrifying as the possibility that she had slept with another boy. If I had been honest, I would have admitted I preferred her suffering to my own.

  Having come this far I had to open the journal, but I decided to work backward, from the last entry. Her entries were vague and enciypted in case of parental discovery.

  Yesterday: Got it, going to use it tomorrow to see what's really happening. Cedar fell off his bike at thegas station like a complete retard. I wish I hadn't told him anything.

  The day earlier: Oh my God, if I didn't have Cedar I don't know what I'd do. I NEED him right now, but what to tell? I'm afraid to tell him everything because maybe he'll fall out of love with me. I couldn't stand the thought of that. Come on Kat, get agrip! You just need an expert opinion on this! First, get the thing. Then, if the thing says it's all true, you'll have to go to the place, and then if that's true, then what? Make it disappear? Will Igo to Hell? Please, God, give me a sign of what to do!

  George's van pulled into the driveway. Having no reasonable escape route, I slid the journal back under the pillow and jumped into Kat's closet. Crouched in a corner I covered myself with stuffed animals and clothes. I could see a sliver of the room through the space between the door and the door frame. I could hear blunted conversation downstairs. Kat made exasperated statements to her mother as she climbed the stairs and entered her room.