I lowered my voice, too, and said, “He is lonely. But I don’t think he would write many people, actually. I think he only interacts with people who are like Wrigley and whichever Thatch twin talks to turtles.”
“Maybe.”
Little Lex was a big, heavyset guy with hunched shoulders, but somehow he carried his weight well, and he had thick, rich hair and bright eyes and a kind smile. What I liked most about him was that he didn’t seem to be trying to prove anything at all—no pretense.
“So why do they call you Little Lex?” I asked in my regular speaking voice, thinking I knew the answer.
He scrunched up his face like he had just tasted something sour. “It’s not a very happy story.”
“So.”
“You really want to know?”
When I nodded, he reached down into his leather briefcase and pulled out a worn notebook and some tracing paper. Next, he furiously traced something—his pencil dancing with great speed for several minutes, his brow wrinkling and unwrinkling—while I watched and wondered. Then he folded the sheet of tracing paper up into a small square and slid it toward me.
“A poem?” I said.
“Yeah. Don’t read it in front of me, okay? Not even Booker has read this one. He wanted me to read poetry to you tonight. But I—I just can’t.”
I picked up the folded piece of paper, stuck it in my pocket, and said, “So why do you think Booker set us up like this?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask him to. I just wanted to meet him after writing so many letters.”
“So this is really, truly the first time you’ve met him?”
“Yeah. I tried before, but Booker used to say our friendship was ‘pure’ because it was all through words and that meeting face-to-face would mean risking it all, which made me want to meet him even more. Also, I just got my driver’s license and a car. So this was the first time I could visit without asking for a ride from my dad. And Booker doesn’t drive, as you know.”
“Why didn’t you want to ask your dad for a ride?”
“I guess I just want to keep my worlds separate.”
I nodded because I knew exactly what he meant. Spending time with Booker was becoming an addiction, mostly because it was the only part of my day when I felt like I could be myself—or maybe like there was one person in the world who didn’t want me to become something I didn’t want to be or to act a certain way or to go along with everything that others pushed into my life. I kept my parents away from Booker, too, because I was afraid they’d infect him with their ideas for my future—their vision for who I should be. Half the time I spent with Booker, my parents thought I was hanging out with my teammates.
I said, “Do you think it’s weird that Booker tricked us into going on a blind date and yet neither of us seems mad or upset? I’m not upset. Are you? I mean, you could be pretending. But you seem pretty okay with tonight.”
He blinked a few times as if he was surprised by my words, and then the sentences that came out of his mouth were both wonderful and sad. “Honestly? This is the best night I’ve had in years. Maybe in my entire lifetime.”
“Seriously?”
He nodded a bit too eagerly, and I could see the little-kid face still hidden behind his long hair and stubble beard, but it was cute, and I suddenly realized that maybe it was the best night I’d had in years, too.
We talked some more over our espressos before we “retired” to Booker’s sunroom for a game of Scrabble, which Booker won by thirty or so points, playing the word qi on a triple-word score, trash-talking the whole time, but Little Lex and I didn’t really mind losing.
When the game was over, Booker and I walked Lex to his car—a brand-new Jeep Wrangler Unlimited with a soft top—and said an awkward good-bye, especially because Booker said, “No kissing my girl on the first date! I’ve got a shotgun inside! I’ll put a bowling-ball-sized hole in your stomach if you don’t treat her right!”
All the blood drained from Little Lex’s face—not because he thought Booker would ever be violent, but because our hero was bringing up our teenage lust before we had properly dealt with it ourselves—and then Lex just drove away without saying anything else.
“What are you up to?” I asked Booker. “Why did you humiliate us like that?”
“Just speeding up the process a bit for you. You won’t be young forever! You should read Philip Larkin’s poem “Annus Mirabilis.” You’ll thank me someday.”
“What?”
“And when you read that poem in your pocket, you’re going to be head over heels. The kid has talent and quite an impressive heart, too.”
“Were you eavesdropping the entire time you were in the kitchen?”
“Of course!”
“You’re a crazy old man.”
“That’s the best kind to be!”
That night, in my perfectly-decorated-by-my-mother bedroom, where I am not permitted to hang a single thing on the pistachio-green walls, I opened up the folded tracing paper.
9
Just to Get Rid of the Cannonballs
LITTLE LEX
By Alex Redmer
“Call him LITTLE,” one of them said, “because he is not”
So they started calling him LITTLE Lex
He was fat and round and short and scared
Like a meteorite that had fallen from the sky
Wondering where he had landed and why
But never getting an answer as he cooled
And he winced when they called him LITTLE
And he puked in the locker room stall after
They stole his shirt and rattail-whipped him with theirs
And then he was punished
Because he was late for class
Because he had no shirt
For not being LITTLE
And he asked his father why
But his father didn’t know
And his teachers didn’t seem to care
Because they rewarded the ones who invented
Cruel names for the ones the teachers never rewarded
And it went on like this
It went on and it went on and on and on and on
But then Little Lex grew tall like an oak tree,
Or a rocket ship
And he was no longer round but rectangular
And his hands were heavy as cannonballs
And his fists could knock the lights out
Of the name-callers’ eyes, which happened
More than once
Easy as snuffing a candle
After licking your fingers
There was blood
And then there were lawyers
And the school principal held a meeting
And everyone agreed
The name LITTLE Lex
Would be banned
Along with his cannonball hands
So the boy named himself LITTLE Lex
And refused to be called by any other moniker
Even when they didn’t want to call
Him LITTLE
He made them
The teachers
The parents
The principal
Everyone
He said, “Call me LITTLE now or else!”
And they did
Just to get rid of the cannonballs
To keep the blood where it belonged
In the name-callers’ bodies
And he was glad to have a choice
And he was
No longer afraid
And no one stole his shirt
Or poked his soft belly with a bony finger
Or punished him unfairly
Or laughed at him when they called him LITTLE
But he was lonely
If only a little
Because he missed the old Alex
—JUST PLAIN ALEX
Who had never hurt anybody
10
Let’s Plug Our Phones In and Sleep Together
Little Lex had written his e-mail addr
ess at the bottom of the poem, along with his cell phone number.
We were texting back and forth five minutes after I finished reading “LITTLE Lex,” and then we were FaceTiming on our iPhones, both of our heads under the covers, which were illuminated by the screens like flashlights in tents.
We talked about his poem.
We talked about The Bubblegum Reaper.
We talked about Booker.
We even talked about our parents and kids in our schools and how we both sort of felt lost—and it was wonderful to be so honest with someone my own age, someone who also knew “the great invisible solitary” that Booker talks about in his novel.
I mentioned Philip Larkin’s poem “Annus Mirabilis,” and Lex said, “The title’s Latin for ‘year of wonders.’”
“How do you know that? Do you take Latin?”
“No. I looked it up when I first read the poem. Want me to read it to you? I have the book right here.”
He read it in this very serious voice.
It’s about sex.
When he finished, we were completely silent for too long, so we laughed to clear the awkward.
Because it’s mentioned in the poem, we Googled the Chatterley ban and learned about D. H. Lawrence and the controversy surrounding his book Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was apparently outlawed for being pornographic even though the synopsis sounded incredibly boring by today’s standards. Some websites say it’s about how you can’t truly be alive without having vivid sexual experiences. Others say it’s sexist or a male fantasy.
“Why would Booker tell you to read that poem?” Little Lex said.
“Maybe because it’s about more than sex. It’s about time, I think. And timing. And missing out on good things because of others’ beliefs.”
And then we talked about The Bubblegum Reaper some more and how Booker maybe was playing a role for us, because deep down inside that old man lived a sadness that paired well with the Larkin poem.
At some point during that first FaceTime conversation, I started to call my new friend Alex instead of Little Lex, and he didn’t correct me, which felt significant after reading the poem he traced.
Alex read me more Philip Larkin poems from the collection Booker had sent him in the mail as a present, and it was then that I realized the old man knew that Alex and I would be having a postdate talk and had planted “Annus Mirabilis” in my mind so that we would have a good discussion topic. Booker knew I’d look up and read anything he referenced or recommended, and so it felt as if the old man was playing some sort of chess match with young love and we were the pieces and Booker was winning.
We talked a lot about a poem called “High Windows,” which Alex read to me. At first I thought it, too, was about sex, but really it’s about how maybe there isn’t anything above us at all when we look up through a high window—and so maybe there is no god, no nothing, which sounds depressing, but Larkin makes it okay and even beautiful, which is sort of a relief.
“Do you believe in God?” I asked Alex.
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“I don’t know, either.”
And then we talked about God for a long time—making a list of all the things that make you want to believe in God, like sunsets and lilies and chai tea with frothy steamed milk, and indie music and wild anonymous acts of charity and books and movies and poetry. But then we talked about all the things that make you give up on the idea of a god, like war and poverty and disease and psychopaths who shoot up people in movie theaters or malls, and friends who let you down and turn mean as they get older, and acne and the need for bathrooms, and stomaching the absurdity of a public school education—although Alex said he went to a private prep elementary school, and it had been even worse. “They taught us that we were better than everyone who wasn’t enrolled at our school, and we believed that. It was ugly.” When we were being honest, it was easier to fill the “No God” list, even though I got the feeling that we both didn’t want it to be that way.
Booker had told Alex about Charles Bukowski, too, and so we took turns reading each other Bukowski poems. Alex read me one called “Bluebird,” which I hadn’t heard before.
It was about hiding something beautiful deep inside you.
I loved it.
“Do you ever weep?” I asked Alex, because Bukowski says he doesn’t in the poem.
“Um,” he said, looking away from his iPhone camera lens. “Yes? I’m no Bukowski, I guess.”
For some reason I told him about what happened when I tried to kiss Mr. Graves and how I ended up sobbing in the nurse’s office on the bed behind the white curtain. Alex was the first person I told. And to my great surprise, it didn’t freak him out. He just listened, and then he said, “I’m sorry that happened to you.” And it felt wonderful to get that secret out of me—to know that Alex didn’t hate me for telling the truth or think I was a whore or a freak.
Just to make sure, I said, “You must think that I’m a nymphomaniac—trying to kiss my teacher.”
“Sounds like you were just confused. I get confused all the time,” he said, which made me want to kiss Alex.
Then we talked a lot about our parents and how we didn’t want to become them, but we had no other role models—or “maps,” Alex kept saying. “My father is a terrible map, mostly because he doesn’t ever lead me anywhere.” And I thought about my parents being maps that led to places I didn’t want to go—and it made a shocking amount of sense, using the word maps to describe parents. It almost made you feel like you could fold Mom and Dad up and lock them away in the glove compartment of your car and just joyride for the rest of your life maybe.
Toward the end of our epic phone conversation, Alex and I were just sort of lying there, looking at each other’s faces through the screens on our little machines, which sounds weird now but felt right—like we were both tired of being alone and therefore didn’t want to say good-bye.
Alex had a wonderful face.
I studied it pixel by pixel.
I could have looked at it forever.
“Let’s plug our phones in and sleep together,” he said. “We don’t have to say good-bye.”
“Okay.”
And so we drifted off to sleep without shutting off our phones, and it felt nice and safe to have him there with me.
When I woke up the next morning and looked at the screen, it was blank. Must have shut off in the middle of the night. I wanted to call him immediately to continue whatever it was we had started. And then it hit me: For the first time, I felt like I knew why girls so often lose their minds when they were in lust or love and how Shannon could get pregnant and how my parents came together so many years ago.
Love and lust were a madness that threatened everything, and yet, if you were in heat, you did not care.
11
The Sexual Tendencies of Teenage Boys
I met Shannon at the Rainbow Dragons’ first soccer practice. Our parents had signed us up. I was standing off to the side, waiting for whatever was about to happen, and this small girl with long, shiny black hair walked over to me, grabbed my hand, and pulled me into the flock of girls waiting for the balls to be released from the coach’s net bag.
“My name is Shannon Welsh. Let’s be friends,” she said, and I nodded.
Shortly after that, Shannon’s picking me out seemed sort of fated, because she would go on to develop the best cross on the team. She was one of the first girls who could actually lift the ball into the air and send it with any accuracy, so our coaches quickly paired us as a team within a team.
The strategy for much of our early days was to get the ball to Shannon by sending it past the defenders and toward the flag (or the other team’s corner), and then Shannon would outrun the defender while I ran toward the goal. She would cross the ball to my head or foot, and I would score. We did this hundreds of times, all throughout town soccer and then on the traveling teams and finally on our high school’s varsity team, which we both made as freshmen.
I always knew Shannon and I were different. She was very talkative in groups and I wasn’t. She was the first girl in our class to have a boyfriend, and that happened when we were in third grade. She even made me her maid of honor in a pretend backyard wedding, which felt as though someone had stuck live electrical wires under my skin, although I did not protest.
And by the time we were in the seventh grade, Shannon was performing fellatio on older high school boys who only seemed to come around when they wanted blow jobs. She’d tell me all about it in great detail, almost as if she were trying to make me jealous or prove to herself that she really enjoyed it, when all the while it was painfully obvious that she was being used.
The worst part was that she knew she was being used and everyone knew the boys were complete assholes, but Shannon claimed to love the sex. And maybe she did love it—not just the attention from older boys and the alcohol they gave her as thanks, but the actual feeling of sex. And if I’m being honest, maybe it’s why I tried to kiss my English teacher, too. It felt good.
Regardless, the older boys told their friends about how easy it was to get middle school girls to give head and then all the high school boys were cruising past our middle school on a daily basis, asking if we car-less girls needed rides home and maybe would like something to drink. Shannon and many of the Rainbow Dragons got into those cars until the parents figured out what was going on and someone’s father got a lawyer involved.
My mother asked me if I ever got into “one of those boy party cars that were cruising by your school looking for BJs,” and when I told her I hadn’t, she asked me why not, which confused me.
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