Rotten (9780545495899)

by Northrop, Michael

  So now I’m done telling Janie, and the phone is so quiet that I think maybe she hung up. I’ve stopped pacing, and now I’m just standing there holding the phone to my ear. I’m waiting for her to tell me never to talk to her again — she honestly deserves better than a juvenile delinquent who lied to her and still doesn’t have his license — or for her to tell me something else. Instead, she asks a question. “Why now?” she says. “Why are you telling me this now?”

  The thing about crazy, stupid decisions, whether you decide not to tell anyone anything or to tell one person everything, is this: They give you a real sense of freedom. I’ve already made up my mind, so now I open my mouth. I tell her about Mars. I tell her, even though it will probably piss her off that the only reason I’m finally telling her all this is that I’ve basically been forced to.

  “You two deserve each other,” she says when I finish.

  “Probably,” I say. “But my mom deserves better. So does my dog.”

  “So do I,” she says. “I have this whole time.”

  I can’t argue with that, so I don’t.

  “But do you think he’ll actually do it?” she says. “Call it off, I mean. Do you think he even can?”

  She’s just saying what I’ve been thinking this whole time. But it’s the only move I’ve got, so I’ve got to try. It’s like dropping a single quarter into that game: There’s a chance if you do and no chance if you don’t. I don’t tell her that, though. That definitely wouldn’t be fair.

  “Guess I’ll find out,” I say, but she’s already hung up.

  Rudy leaves me hanging Tuesday morning. The grass is still wet from some overnight rain and my sneakers are soaked through by the time I wake up enough to realize what’s happened. I know I deserve it, but it’s still a major pain in the butt. The bus has already come and gone and I have to scramble to get a ride from Mom. Now she’s going to be late, but I have to do it; I’m supposed to meet Mars before homeroom.

  “Miscommunication,” I say to Mom, and she doesn’t ask again, just takes a long sip of coffee from her travel mug every few minutes. Her car is less of a beater than the Fiesta, so we make good time.

  Rudy acts like nothing happened when we bump into each other in the hallway. I do, too. Sometimes you just have to take the hit. Speaking of which, “Got to go make Mars’s day,” I say to Rudy.

  “You going to tell him?”

  “Kind of have to,” I say, leaving it at that.

  “Your funeral.”

  It’s not hard to find Mars. He’s digging through his locker for something, already a huge mess in there after exactly one day. I stand against the wall on the other side, so that when he slams his locker shut, there I am. He jumps.

  “Jesus, JD,” he says, and then he remembers why I’m there and his eyes light up. It’s like watching a thick morning fog burn off in half a second, and it gives me kind of a sick feeling. After telling Rudy and Janie, telling Mars should be easy. Should be, but I can tell immediately that it won’t be. I feel defensive, nervous. I don’t trust him the way I trust those two.

  “Let’s walk,” he says.

  We’re headed around the corner, to a quieter hallway with no lockers. We’re ten feet in and the sound behind us has already faded to a dull roar. Mars turns around, looks at me, and says, “So?”

  This is stupid, I think, and it seems so true that I consider saying it. But the idea of this all just going away is really strong. “All right,” I say, but I’m still trying to convince myself. I remember what he said yesterday, the one line that hooked me: “We’re friends, right?” It’s not that I even necessarily doubt him on that. We’ve definitely known each other long enough. It’s just that he was never that reliable of a friend.

  “Come on, Jimbo,” says Mars. “Lay it on me.”

  “Have you talked to your mom?” I say. “Your dad?”

  “I will,” he says. “I was scouting out the terrain last night.”

  A teacher walks by. She doesn’t know who we are, not by name anyway, but she gives us a long look the whole way. We act like we’re talking about nothing, and then she passes and I tell Mars everything, more or less. I tell him I got caught shoplifting downtown. I remind him about the fight, not that he’d forget. None of us was exactly blameless in the lead-up to it, but he’s the one who started shouting back at them. I’m not trying to put that whole thing on him. I’m just giving him something else to think about.

  Then I tell him about upstate and rattle off a lot of details fast. I’m hoping there’s only so much information he can process at this hour. I think it’s even working because he wants to know all about that part. “How much like prison is it?” he says. “Like prison on TV?”

  “Well, it lasts a lot longer than an hour, for one,” I say.

  He thinks that’s funny, and I add some more. I tell him how the place where I was had kind of like a halfway house vibe, how they called it a “treatment program,” “rehabilitation.” He makes a don’t-drop-the-soap joke and seems really disappointed when I tell him it wasn’t like that, either. I shouldn’t have said that. I feel like I need to give him his money’s worth, humiliation-wise.

  I’m talking and talking, and it’s like that nightmare where you’re running down a hallway but never getting closer to the end. The idea of him having his folks drop the lawsuit is the door I’m trying to get to, but the look on his face, the tone of his voice, none of it’s changing. And then I’m done, and the bell’s about to go off anyway. It’s not the first day of school anymore, and if we’re late, we’re really late.

  “Man,” he says. “You’re like a felon or something.”

  I shrug, acting embarrassed. He needs to think there’s some reason I haven’t told him this already. But he sniffs it out.

  “So that’s it?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Wait,” he says. “What’d’ya take?”

  The warning bell goes off and it occurs to me I haven’t even been to my own locker yet. That door at the end of the hallway is even farther away now, so I reach for it. I grab the handle.

  “But you seriously can’t tell anyone,” I say.

  “Course, man,” he says.

  “Perfume,” I say, “for Mother’s Day. Really expensive perfume.”

  He erupts into laughter. Mars laughs like a hyena when he thinks something is really funny. It’s not one of his better qualities, and most of his other qualities aren’t that good.

  “That’s enough, man,” I say.

  He holds up his hand, like, I’m trying. The final bell’s about to go off and I leave him there, still laughing. The last words I say to him are: “We have a deal!”

  We do, and I’ve definitely done my part. The hallway from the nightmare vanishes, and now I’m running down a real one.

  I try to feel good about it, like I’ve crossed some tough job off my to-do list. The next time I see Mars, he’s stopped laughing and gives me a serious-looking thumbs-up. I even start to think that maybe Rudy and I should sit at the table with him and Aaron at lunch, but in between second and third periods, I find out how wrong I am. How wrong, and how stupid.

  A junior named Travis and a sophomore whose name I forget are heading toward me in the hallway. Travis is a level down from me, which means he’s in most of the same classes as Mars.

  He takes a big whiff of the air as we pass. “Smells nice,” he says. His voice is trailing off now, and the sophomore is chuckling like the little toady he is, so I barely hear the rest. “Almost like perfume.”

  I whip my head around, but all I manage to do is stare.

  Two seconds later, Rudy rounds the corner.

  “Dude,” he says.

  “I just heard.”

  The rest of the morning goes about how you’d expect: like a war movie. I track down Mars in the same way a heat-seeking missile tracks down a jet. He’s by his locker when I find him, and not surprisingly, his mouth is flapping.

  “That didn’t take long,” I say.
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  “What?” he says, but his smirk tells me he already knows.

  “You’re scum, man,” I say, but that’s nothing he hasn’t heard before. I’m searching every dark corner of my brain for something that will hurt him. I find something I think might work, dust it off, and say: “You and your drunken hillbilly family.” I do my imitation of the hillbilly guy on The Simpsons: “Garsh, Daisy May, you done pooped out another one. Think I’ll call this one Mars, like the candy bar.”

  Now his eyes narrow, but his smile just gets bigger.

  “Be careful,” he says, “or I won’t have my hillbilly folks drop the lawsuit.”

  And the way he says that last part, like the words just aren’t long enough to contain all the sarcasm he’s trying to pack into them, lets me know what an idiot I was to even try, to gamble on that 1-percent chance. It stings a little extra because I let him bait me into it: “We’re friends, right?”

  And now he’s just standing there, grinning at me. I tell myself not to, but I can’t help it. I take a quick step forward, my hands coming up as I move. I’m just going to give him a good shove, see how that goes. But before I can, two hands clamp down on my shoulders from behind, strong hands, pulling me up short. I wheel around, and the hands fall away.

  It’s Aaron. Of course. He puts one hand back on my shoulder, almost friendly, but still controlling me. “Settle down, man,” he’s saying. “Come on, JD.”

  I shake his hand off, and this time he lets me. “Stay out of this, man,” I say.

  He shakes his head. “Can’t do it.”

  This is such bull. I knew he’d take Mars’s side. I give Aaron a quick look, confirming what I already know. I can’t beat him. Mars starts to say something behind me, almost in my ear, but Aaron shoots him a look and cuts him off: “You too, Mars. You’ve said enough.”

  I guess I should be grateful, but I’m mostly just annoyed Aaron is here. I start to walk away just as Rudy arrives. To his everlasting credit, he’s pissed on my behalf. Maybe on his own, too. Everyone knows we’re best friends, so he’s going to get some splatter from Perfumegate.

  Rudy is wearing a long-sleeve T-shirt that says JUST DID IT. Our great triumph of second period was convincing Mr. Morill that it’s an “inspirational athletic slogan,” as evidenced by the poorly drawn Nike swoosh above it. Now he’s heading for Mars and has a look in his eyes like he’s going to Just Do something violent. I save Aaron the trouble and put my arm out in front of Rudy. “He’s useless,” I say.

  “You might want to pick your friends better,” Mars says to him. “Maybe based on something besides” — he pauses, savoring it — “their scent.”

  “You might want to pick yours better,” Rudy tells Aaron.

  Now it’s like a four-way, crosswise argument. I do the right thing and just walk away. I’m not going to win this battle, and what would it matter if I did? I’ve already lost the war. Rudy fires a few more individual swears at Mars and then comes with me. We’re gone before any teachers arrive.

  “Mars is made of dick,” says Rudy, as if I’m going to argue.

  By lunch, everyone knows. Or at least everyone I know knows. We sit with the Goonies again, or at least we try to. Randall and Jesse are already at a table when we get there. They eye us with suspicion, disgust, or both as we drop our trays, but they don’t stand up and leave. But Tal and Junior Goonie First Class Evan spot us early and walk right by the table.

  I’m double Kryptonite right now. Juvie basically makes me a delinquent and a lowlife around here. The only people who won’t mind that are the tough kids and actual lowlifes, and they’ll think the perfume makes me a wimp or worse.

  Randall and Jesse don’t say much about it. They don’t say much at all. Then, right at the end, Randall goes, “Maybe, uh, maybe you shouldn’t sit here tomorrow.”

  “You’re pathetic,” says Rudy, even though we’re the ones left sitting alone.

  By the time I get to English I’m so beat down that if I had a car, I’d just cut and go home. But I don’t and I’m really wondering how Janie is going to react. She is, after all, the girl I was dating when I went on my now legendary (by Dahlimer standards) crime spree. Some of them will remember the fight and the rest will just speculate — armed robbery? Auto theft? — because everyone knows they don’t send you away for your first offense.

  I guess she’s wondering how she’s going to react too, because she just avoids me until class starts. It’s easy enough to do, sitting four rows away. Meanwhile, Aaron is sitting on the other side of Rudy again, and the two of them have been rapid-fire whispering back and forth.

  Class starts and I finally look at the dry-erase board. Mr. Kibbee is standing there and he slowly and clearly writes: Smells Like Teen Spirit. It’s the title of a Nirvana song, and I’m thinking: Oh, please don’t. But he does. He reads us the lyrics to the song and we have to analyze it as poetry. Some of the kids think it’s “unfair to real poetry,” but the rest of us understand immediately that it’s unfair to the song.

  It’s debatable, but I consider Nirvana a punk band. Their sound is pretty heavy, and they have lyrics like “I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black.”

  Early on, Kibbee asks, “Does anyone know where the title ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ comes from?”

  I know the answer, but I don’t raise my hand. I figure I’ll let Kibbee relive his youth, or whatever he’s doing, and tell us himself. But he must suspect that at least one of us knows, and he keeps waiting.

  “No one? Really?” he says.

  Finally, I raise my hand.

  “Yes, JD.”

  “Teen Spirit was a kind of girls’ deodorant,” I say. “I think maybe Cobain’s girlfriend wore it. Anyway, someone wrote ‘Kurt smells like Teen Spirit’ on his wall.”

  Kibbee nods and smiles. “Yes, exactly. Excellent, JD.”

  For a few seconds, I actually feel kind of good about myself. Then, two rows up, Jefferson raises his hand.

  “Yes, Jeff,” says Kibbee. To give you an idea of what a teacher’s pet he is, the teachers are the only ones who call him that.

  “So, a kind of girls’ deodorant,” he starts. “Is that like perfume?”

  Eighty percent of the class laughs. No one is too uncool to get fat off my corpse today.

  “Wanna kill something?” Rudy says as he drops me off in front of my house. He’s asking if I want to play video games. If we were still talking about Mars, he would’ve said “someone.”

  “Nah,” I say. “Gonna walk the dog.”

  “Is that what they call it these days?” he says.

  The Fiesta drives off with a roar that promises more speed than it delivers. All bark and no bite. JR, who it turns out is some of each, hears it and his head pops up in the window. The muzzle is still hanging on the back of the kitchen door when I squeeze inside. I ignore it and go get his leash from the other room.

  The combination of me being home and having the leash in my hand has him wild-eyed and drooly mouthed with excitement. He pauses as I put the leash on and actually sort of drops his head down to let me, but then he’s back to whirling around and barking.

  I have to make him calm down before we head out. I learned that on Dog Whisperer, too. If he bolts out the door with me basically waterskiing behind him, then he’s in charge, and he’ll expect to stay that way the whole walk. I tug the leash a little, look at him, and go: “Grrrrrr!” He powers down about 50 percent. I do it again. He looks back at me like he’s considering something. The brown dots above each eye raise up a little. Then, honest to God, he sits down.

  “Good boy,” I say, and we’re ready to go.

  As soon as the door opens, he nearly pulls my arm out of its socket. OK, so it’s still a work in progress. I work hard to rein him in as we cross the yard. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this, but JR weighs close to a hundred pounds, and at least half of that is muscle. “Grrrr!” I say. “Come on, Johnny, GRRRRR!”

  The growl is supposed to show that I�
��m the “pack leader,” but my voice breaks so badly on the last one that it sounds like a squeak toy. JR turns and looks. With that first burst behind him, he slows to a trot. I get him down to a walk without too much trouble, but it is highly debatable who’s in charge at this point. It doesn’t matter much once we hit the trail.

  Until we see the Pomeranian.

  It’s one of those little dogs — fashion accessories, basically. If JR is mostly muscle, this thing is mostly fluff, and it looks like a strong breeze could carry it away. I look down at JR. “Don’t even think about it, boy,” I say.

  Yeah, sometimes dogs bite people, but most of the violence has always been dog on dog. I’ve only been watching the dog programs on TV for a little while, but I already know that encounters between yappy little breeds and powerful large breeds are the Shark Week of the pet world.

  “Oh, he’s gorgeous!” says the lady holding the fluff ball’s leash. “Is he friendly?”

  “Thanks,” I say. “Good question.”

  The little dog lets out a few high-pitched yaps. JR opens his mouth wide, and a long strand of drool drops to the ground like an escape ladder. Then he snaps off one big “WARRFF!”

  The little dog may have a brain the size of a grape, but it knows enough to stop yapping. The eyes of both dogs are wide open. My muscles are super tense. It’s not the “calm, assertive energy” I should be projecting, but I need to prepare for the lunge. An image flashes through my mind, crystal clear in the way that mistakes are afterward: I see the blue muzzle hanging from the doorknob, the metal rings reflecting the light as I open the door.

  The lady is wearing a pink warm-up suit and holding a pink leash. Even worse, the Pomeranian is leading her: It’s six or seven pounds tops but 100 percent in charge. After a brief pause, the little dog is on the move. It’s heading straight toward JR in a series of prancey toy-soldier steps, and the lady is following dutifully along.