"We've driven all over this goddamn town looking for you," my dad said.
"Are you going to tell us where you were all day?" my mother said.
"Hanging out," I said.
"You missed Mr. Dickman's lawn. He called and asked why you didn't show," my mom said.
"I was just getting something to eat."
My mom's eyes tightened in the rear view mirror. "Why two beverages?"
"I was taking one to Kat."
"She lives nearby, doesn't she? Let's drive there." My mom put the car in gear and sped out of the parking lot. The sharpness with which she cut corners, the emphatic way she hit the brakes, all of it was a mechanical extension of a fight that had commenced between my parents, and we had to endure it with our stomachs climbing up out of our rib cages.
"We know you're sneaking out to fool around with Kat," my dad said.
"Stop the car, I'm going to throw up," I said.
My mother pulled over. She turned around in her seat and yelled at me. "What the hell are you hiding?"
I became unmistakably a boy. My mouth twisted into an awful grimace as I started to sob. Whatever argument my parents had been enduring deteriorated into their personal record books of fights won and lost as they attended to my sorrows. And what a shit I was for even crying about it at all; it wasn't as though I was the one who'd just gotten the abortion. I told them everything between heaving sobs -the boat trip, the clinics, the empty house. For the first time in months they quietly listened to me. My dad even reached back and touched my head, then slid his palm down to my cheek and wiped a tear with his thumb. They said they believed me that the pregnancy hadn't been my doing, and agreed to drive me to Kat's old place. My mother said she would take care of everything and not tell Kat's parents. My dad promised to buy a can opener. When we arrived at the house Kat was gone.
When I called Tuesday night Kat's mom answered, picking up the phone while laughing at something. Still chuckling she said hello. I almost hung up but feared Veronica would have been able to recognize me by the sound of my breathing. I asked for Kat.
"I'm sorry, Katie's asleep. She said she wasn't feeling well. But say, when are you going to come by and see the new place? We should have you over for dinner again. George? What do you think about inviting Cedar over for dinner one of these nights?"
I agreed to come over that Friday and hung up the cheap phone I'd won in a fund-raising drive. My parents mumbled in the kitchen, a low boil of conversation. I decided I wouldn't leave my room tonight, and would distract myself with physiology texts. I opened a volume, bored and distracted barely a paragraph into it. My mom knocked on my door and said through the wood, "Cedar, we need to talk to you."
"I really would like to be left alone right now, thanks."
"This can't wait. Meet us in the kitchen."
I extracted myself from my bed and stood in the center of my room remembering a story I'd heard once about some kid's older brother who was on antipsychotic medication. One night he had taken a couple of his pills and spent three hours crawling from one side of his living room to the other to retrieve a bottle cap. When I'd heard the story I had been appalled by the idea, but now that degree of sedation sounded like a pretty swell time.
I found my parents seated at opposite sides of the dinette table, looking serious. I was sure they were going to launch into me about how I had handled this whole abortion event, ground me, make me see a shrink, whatever.
"Your mother and I are separating."
The sentence landed. We were all silent for a good period of time. Then my dad continued with the logistics, saying he was moving to a house in the city, that I would stay here with my mom, that my wishes about visitation and living arrangements would be welcomed, something about lawyers, something about child-care payments. Something about none of this being my fault. They expected me to cry so I tried not to. Maybe if time had been rewound and Kat had never gotten pregnant and had an abortion, maybe then I would have been able to coolly assess the situation, but that they had chosen this day of all days to make their little announcement cracked what rickety scaffolding I was using to hold myself together and I cried for the second time, like a little kid again, hating myself for indulging their expectation that I would cry, an expectation reinforced by the incongruous box of facial tissue standing at the ready next to the salt and pepper shakers.
"Fuck you!" I said. "Fuck both of you."
I locked myself in my room and barred the door with my dresser, though they could have gotten in had they really wanted to. When I was about ten I used to play a trick on my parents, crawling between my mattress and the box spring of my bed. At first my mom had scolded me, saying I could suffocate, but the mattress wasn't really that heavy. I had "tricked" them this way every night for a few months when they tucked me in. My dad would come into the room and say, "Gee, where's Cedar? I thought he was in here," and as I giggled he would sigh and sit lightly on the bed, saying, "I guess I'll just rest here on Cedar's bed until he comes back. Boy, am I ever sleepy." As he increased his weight on the mattress, I would giggle more until he leaped up and pulled the mattress away and exclaim that he'd found me. Tonight I crawled under the mattress for the first time in years and choked in darkness.
The next day Paul met me at the train trestle over the river. I immediately demanded a cigarette. Absurdly, he had grown a mustache since I'd last seen him, if you could call the wispy insect legs sprouting at various angles from his upper lip a mustache.
"What the hell is that on your lip?"
"Oh, this?" Paul said, stroking the 'stache. "It's my pussy tickler, bro."
It felt good to laugh, but I didn't laugh long. Leaning against the rail I gazed into the hypnotic brown eddies below. I told him about my parents, holding off on the Kat stuff to see how he'd respond. "Do you think your mom and dad would let me stay at your place for awhile? While my folks iron things out?"
Paul put his arm around my shoulder and gave it a pat. The gesture seemed like a kid mimicking an adult, or mimicking something seen on TV. I shrugged him off. "Kat stopped talking to me."
"Yeah, man, I'm sorry. I heard what happened."
"Who told you?"
"Her name starts with M and rhymes with Men At Work's hit album Cargo."
"What did she say?"
"She said Kat and you broke up."
I squeezed the rusty railing and watched the blood disappear from my hands. "I'm just going to kill myself now."
"What happened? I thought you guys were doing great."
"She never told me we broke up."
"Ooops."
My empty stomach squeezed its bile. I had only eaten an English muffin that day. More blood on my lips. I told Paul I'd be at his house around dinner time then got on my bike and pedaled across town to Kat's new house. I knew the neighborhood, and found the place by recognizing Veronica's car. As I walked up to the door, Veronica came around the side of the house with a gardening bucket full of weeds.
"Cedar! You made it over here. Let's go in, I want to show you the new place."
I followed Kat's mom into the split-level, staring dumbly at the panty line through her stretch pants as we ascended to the living room. There was already an Olan Mills portrait of Veronica, George, and Kat hanging above the mantle. They were all smiling like idiots in front of a fake forest background, wearing matching green sweaters. Unbelievable. George's hand was on Kat's shoulder. Fucking child molester.
"Katie! Your friend Cedar's here! I'll fix us some lemonade, yeah?"
"That sounds great," I said.
Kat emerged from her bedroom down the hall and looked at me incredulously.
"How come you won't talk to me?" I whispered.
"I can't believe you just showed up like this."
I followed Kat to her bedroom. "Can't I visit my girlfriend? Or did I miss the fact that we're not going out anymore?"
"You should have gotten the message."
"You should have told me to my face you wan
ted to break up." I looked around Kat's new room, easily twice the size of her old one. "You like living here with your new pervert dad?"
"You should just leave."
"I'm not leaving until you explain why you want to break up. After all that shit I went through for the abortion."
"Quit talking so loud."
I repeated, whispering, "After all the shit I went through for the abortion."
"All the shit you went through? That was my thing. It's not your thing. I get to live in my body. You get to have your rich parents pay your way through college, and become a lawyer or some shit. You get to forget about everything."
"But I won't forget. Kat, please, don't break up with me. Not right now, okay? My parents are getting divorced."
"Lemonade!" Veronica called.
"I can't take care of your problems right now," Kat said. "In a second, Mom!"
"You don't even care. My dad's moving out this week. They don't even give a shit where I end up."
Kat squinted and gave me the kind of disgusted look pioneered by fourteen-year-old girls. "Now you know what it's like for the rest of us, Cedar."
To be polite, I drank lemonade and ate shortbread cookies with Kat and her mother on the weathered deck overlooking an overgrown backyard. Somehow I managed to have a conversation with Veronica about her landscaping plans. Mowing lawns had made me some kind of expert. I heard myself expressing opinions on fertilizer. A tangle of verbs and nouns strained against the roof of my mouth, How's it feel to know your fiance raped your daughter? Oh, Kat didn't tell you? but I only talked of bulbs and weed killer.
"Well, are you going to tell him?" Veronica asked Kat.
"Tell him what?"
"You know. About Labor Day?"
"My mom and George are going to have a wedding."
"That's great," I said.
"Nothing fancy, just a service at St. Matthew's and a reception at the All-Purpose Hall," Veronica said. "Katie is going to be my maid of honor. You should come, Cedar!"
"I wouldn't want to miss it," I said.
Veronica picked up our plates and glasses and, humming, returned them to the kitchen. Kat and I listened to birds, not saying anything. I wanted to tell her I was sorry about everything, but her dumping me erected a stubborn barrier against my sympathies.
"Are you happy now?" Kat said.
"About what?"
"About getting invited to the wedding?"
"Yeah, where's the honeymoon? In your bedroom?"
"Fuck you. You think you know everything about my life but you know shit. You have no idea who I even am."
"I think I'm going to kill myself. Yeah, do you all a favor."
"Shut up, Cedar. You're not going to kill yourself."
"At least I didn't kill a baby."
What happened next was so sudden it took my mind several attempts to assemble the sequence. I looked down and saw the front of my shirt covered with blood. Kat stood over me, breathing hard. Slowly, my nose started to throb. Then I understood that's where the blood was coming from. I choked, spit up some blood that had gone down the back of my throat. Kat's fist was still clenched. She had decked me pretty hard.
"I'm going home now," I said.
Our house was a fissure, a widening wound. It was the middle of the day so I knew my parents would be at work. My dad had been sleeping on a futon in the guest bedroom, where several boxes had begun to accrete his belongings. His extraction from the house had been slowed by the daily bullshit routines to which he had to hew, and his effects looked haphazardly gathered. A half-eaten candy bar sat sheathed in its frayed wrapper on the desk. I imagined my dad setting it there, chewing as he slipped books and old Christmas presents into these dull brown cubes. The candy bar looked grotesque to me, the byproduct of some foul and biological process. There was nothing in this room I needed. I went to my bedroom and threw clothes and an anatomy text in a duffel. I needed some bathroom things. My toothbrush looked like it had been dragged behind a car, its bristles flattened and falling out. I imagined it sitting beside the Dillses' toothbrushes and Paul making fun of me about it. We kept a stock of new toothbrushes in the bathroom downstairs, which had been transformed into my mom's darkroom, with an enlarger sitting on the toilet and dried pictures hanging from a cord stretched between the shower curtain rod and a hook on the opposite wall. I rummaged through the drawers for the dental supplies. A line of photographs hung behind me, reflected backward in the mirror. I expected to see the usual hair and mucus textures of my mom's work, but these looked like candid shots of people.
They were pictures of my dad meeting his girlfriend outside a restaurant. In one he stood with his head turned expectantly, looking down the block. A woman approaching; an embrace. There is a kiss. Next, he's got his hand on her ass and they're entering the restaurant. Then they're coming back out, smiling. A couple shots of them talking. Another kiss, my dad's hands cradling her face. Then a zoom on her, a close-up as she clears strands of hair from her eyes. She's much younger than my dad, with dark straight hair and big eyes, breasts distorting the ridges of her sweater. Another shot of her walking away, her back, her skirt stretched over the two promontories of her ass.
I removed this last picture from the line, set it on the sink, and beat off onto it.
When I finished washing up I crumpled the comed-on photo into a ball and stuffed it into the kitchen garbage under a pile of honeydew rinds. I left a note to my parents addressed "To Whom It May Concern," informing them I'd be staying at Paul's.
Paul's house was a riot of kids, dogs, and the massive medieval-role-playing props his parents used at weekend Renaissance fairs. At one point some officials from the city had ordered them to dismantle the backyard trebuchet after neighbor complaints. Not that their neighbors had much room to complain. The Dills lived in a real-estate agent's nightmare of a yellow house with railroad tracks on one side and a halfway house for ex-cons on the other. Across the tracks was a vegetable processing factory that clanked and screeched at all hours. On the other side of the halfway house was a fire station. Paul's house managed to feel like some sort of haven amid this madness.
Paul's mom Henrietta was morbidly obese, north of three hundred pounds. She sweated in her thin housedress on the couch playing lute or making the kids castles from yogurt containers and pipe cleaners. They had no TV, by choice. Occasionally, one of Paul's younger brothers would get hurt and run crying to be comforted in the folds of Henrietta's girth. Various dogs and cats from other neighborhoods prowled the living room. Every time I visited, Paul's dad Sven was busy with some gigantic project, ripping insulation out of the attic or troubleshooting the septic tank, his red afro atop an expression of intense concentration, eyes obscured behind the thick lenses of his glasses. When I walked up the driveway past chalked hopscotch schema and abandoned toy cars he pulled off his gloves and came over to pat me on the back.
"I understand your folks are going through some rough times," Sven said. "You're welcome here as long as you need to stay. And as long as it's okay with your mom and dad."
"Thanks, Sven," I said, then entered the house. Paul's two little brothers were whacking each other with foam swords, in the nude.
"Cedar! Hugs!" Henrietta exclaimed. I came up behind her on the couch and wrapped my arms around her shoulders. Everything about her physical appearance should have revolted me-her hairy armpits and shoulders studded with skin tags-but I recognized only the same warmth of welcome I had always felt at this house. Paul came downstairs in his Stormtrooper mask, gave me the double middlefinger salute, farted theatrically, and launched himself onto an easy chair. Paul's brother Douglas whapped his brother Bertrand a little too hard on the side of the head. Bertrand stood in the middle of the living room, his face frozen in a silent prescream, then released his wail.
While Henrietta attended to the little boys, I followed Paul upstairs to the unfinished addition to their house, his room. The walls were still Sheetrock, the floors exposed plywood. The Dills had gone a li
ttle crazy with the skylights, studding the ceiling with bubblelike protrusions of molded plastic. Whether the family ever intended to complete this part of their house was anyone's guess, but Paul seemed to like it this way. Later, when I thought of my childhood, I would envision it unfolding in this room, with bags of Cheetos and off-brand colas, Paul and I poring over the handouts Henrietta used in the classes where she taught sex ed to retarded people.
"Check out what my parents bought me," Paul said, tossing a High Society magazine my way.
"You're kidding."
"No, man. My mom asked if I was interested in pornography. We had a big discussion about it. They think that if they give it to me now it won't become a big deal later on. Some kind of parenting-book crap like that. Whatever. Just check out the aureole on the chick on page eighty-nine. I've been using it to try to come."
"Any luck with that?"
"Almost," Paul said. "I think."
I leafed through the magazine, unaroused at the airbrushed and stapled flesh. I set it down.
"What happened to your nose?" Paul said.
"Kat punched me."
"Wow, I guess you guys really are broken up."
"I told her she killed a baby," I said, then remembered I hadn't let Paul in on any of the abortion stuff. Now I had to tell him. Shocked and fascinated, he listened to the story. At one point Douglas crawled up the steps to spy on us, eliciting a wave of action-figure-throwing retribution from Paul, more crying and yelling from downstairs, and a reprimand from Henrietta. Scent tendrils of spaghetti sauce crawled up from the kitchen. I told Paul I wanted George dead. The phone rang. Sven said it was my mother.
"We got your note," my mom said.
"That's nice."
"How long were you intending to stay at Paul's?"
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