by Jacob Allen
“Kevin Torres,” I said.
“Kevin, welcome, bud,” Adam said.
So no surprises. Interesting.
“Nick!” Adam said, looking up the stairs. “We got a new honorary member of the Broad Street Boys.”
“Oh, gotta replace Karl, huh?”
“Karl?”
“Some asshole that moved away,” Adam said, ignoring the question. “We need someone new that we can mold with us. You’re new and not afraid of us. That’s what we’re looking for.”
What is this? Am I part of some club?
“So what do the Broad Street Boys do?” I asked.
“Oh, we run this place,” Adam said with a smile. “Kevin, you’re going to have to prove yourself to be a part of this group. We don’t just hand out memberships left and right. My little brother wants to join, but he’s an annoying little shit, so he’s not in yet. Instead, we’re giving you an opportunity. You in?”
It was so drastic a change from the previous two schools, I couldn’t help but say yes immediately. I’d barely made any friends at those locations, and this was a spot where not only did I immediately have friends, I hadn’t even had to try to make friends. The friends had come to me.
“Hell yeah, man,” I said.
“Good, here’s the first thing,” Adam said. “There’s a really hot chick named Emily Zane I’m interested in. I need you to find out if she’s single or not. Can you do that?”
My eyes went wide. I wasn’t great with girls. And now I suddenly had to find out if some cute girl was single or not?
“Hello? Earth to new kid. You in or you a Broad Street bitch?”
“What? Yeah, I’m in, I’m in!”
I’d figure it out later. I’d probably get humiliated later, but I had friends now. This is what friends did to each other, anyways. They mocked and teased each other. Right?
“Good. You should take down her phone number in case you think it’s a good idea.”
Adam pulled out an iPhone X, a phone that I had immediately dismissed upon first viewing, knowing it was going to be too expensive for my father. I’d figured it was going to go for five hundred bucks or so. When I saw the ad say it was a thousand bucks, I actually laughed out loud. My father laughed too, one of the rare moments in which we both were laughing.
With extreme self-consciousness, I pulled out my flip phone. Unfortunately, Adam and Nick noticed immediately.
“What is that?” Nick said, as if I had just pulled out alien technology.
“That’s some homeless shit right there,” Adam said with a chuckle. “Really, a flip phone? What is this, 1997?”
I didn’t bother to tell them that my father had driven me over in such a vehicle.
“Hey, I like to be retro,” I lied, hoping that that would end the jokes.
It did not.
“Retro to before we were born, maybe,” Nick said, drawing a high-five from Adam.
I still liked that I could call these guys my friends, but this was a little annoying. Then again, who else did I have?
“In any case, do your duty, Kevin, and report back,” Adam said. “You’ll be a full-fledged Broad Street Boy once you do this. Understood?”
“Yep,” I said.
The bell rang, alerting us that we had to be in our homerooms. Adam barely budged.
“I’ll get there eventually,” he said. “But as a new kid, you probably should hurry over. Welcome to the club!”
Even though I was late, even though I had gotten pushed around and mocked for being poor—something that I had a feeling was only going to become more evident the more time I spent at this school and its high school—I still felt hope. I finally had friends at a new school.
Now, I just had to prove myself.
Present Day
I still felt like I was proving myself.
It was January 6th, 2020. It was a new decade, one that should have signaled a lot of hope. Hope for the first decade of adulthood, the first decade in which I’d be on my own—after the next six months. Hope for a decade in which I wouldn’t have to continue to be the boys’ bitch.
Because even after that party, Adam would keep asking me to run errands and would keep asking me to do him favors. Nothing had changed since that first day in eighth grade. Granted, I still thought of Adam as a friend, and it was clear that he cared about me.
But I was beginning to reach a breaking point with all of this. There was only so much nonsense and bullshit I could take before I’d snap in some fashion. At least right now, being the only Broad Street Boy to school early, I could have some moments of peace to myself.
Not that it mattered. I had signed up for some AP classes, but it didn’t matter. I was going to a college that I could afford, not one that would challenge me. Courses like AP Math, AP Chemistry, and AP History would be enjoyable; courses like PE, Religious Studies, English, and Music Studies were taken because I just didn’t give a fuck. It’s not like I had a reason to take foreign language since I wasn’t going to travel. It wasn’t like I needed to compete with the kids going to Vanderbilt, Duke, and Emory. I just needed to survive the next few months without failing a course or getting suspended. If I could pull both of those off, I was smooth sailing.
For now, though, it was 6:45 a.m., I hadn’t made it to a single class, and I had a bunch of unknowns in front of me.
Like, for example, who was going to be the first person to school besides me here.
A few of the teachers saw me and nodded to me. They knew I was the sullen type, and they probably looked forward to having me out as much as I looked forward to having them out. Adam’s stepfather would arrive eventually and say something stupid like “Good morning, Mr. Torres” while thinking “you’re one of the assholes who throws parties at my house while I’m gone.”
But as long as I wasn’t within range of my father, I didn’t care that I had arrived so early. The whispers of the teachers, the condescending attitude of the older administrators, and the questioning glances from the other students were so much better than what I would have to deal with at home. Here, I had control.
Not over everyone, obviously. But I had enough.
I slumped in front of my locker and put my headphones in, listening to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Like I said, I liked the time-tested, proven shit; I didn’t really need to learn whatever number 18 on the top 40 list was when, in fifteen years, it would barely be anything more than a passive memory for most of the people in my class.
Normally, at this point, I’d be catching up on homework that I failed to complete because of my father’s behavior, but today, I just chose to zone out. Adam would be coming soon, bringing with him his usual bullshit; Jackie would be coming soon, bringing her usual pestering of questions; and God knows what else would happen. If I could have even just one song’s worth of quiet, I would take it.
I got through “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Another One Bites the Dust” when “Killer Queen” came on. This was one of my favorite songs; for whatever reason, it somehow felt like the kind of thing you could sing to both sound cool and sound intelligent. It was one of those rare songs that hit multiple layers beyond just the lyrics; how you sounded and how you felt also were multi-layered.
“Dynamite with a laser beam! Guaranteed to blow your mind.”
And then I looked up and saw Jackie walk in.
Anytime!
And cue the guitar solo.
There were only a few other students, all of them in isolated cliques. There was nothing separating the two of us from talking other than, hopefully, some common sense from Jackie to remember how the last time we’d hung out had gone. She started by saying hello to one of the baseball players, some guy named Jake. Next, she went to one of the girls in band, Allison.
And then…
Fuck. It’s gonna be me.
I studied her closer. Her skin seemed to have gotten lighter since I saw her. Maybe that was because of the lack of sunlight, or maybe it was some nebulous reason l
ike her feeling in a better place or something like that. Today, she was wearing a long, floral patterned black-and-red dress, and her hair seemed more curly than usual. I had to admit, with a look like that, it was all but impossible to keep my eyes off of her.
Which made it just that much more frustrating when she came over. If I wanted to speak to her, I wanted it on my terms, damnit. And now my morning peace was getting ruined. And replaced by something better?
“Hi, Kevin,” she said with a guarded but nevertheless presence smile.
I should have said something nice. At the very least, I should have just grunted in her general direction, an acknowledgment of her presence but not an outright embrace of it.
Instead, I continued what I’d done at the party.
“I’m impressed by your amnesia,” I said.
When she looked at me askance, I sighed.
“I guess winter break also killed your SAT vocabulary. Do you not remember what I said to you at the party? To leave me alone?”
“You didn’t say that,” she said, still forcefully keeping her smile on. “You said don’t push your luck. You called me Jack. And you said to never sneak up on you from behind. So I made sure to approach you from the front.”
Damn.
She remembers everything. And I mean everything.
I guess I don’t give her enough credit. Too bad I can’t show her that I’m impressed with you.
“Do you remember what you said?”
“Oh ho, well, I guess they taught you in comeback school to just echo me, huh?” I said with a false chuckle. “I guess they also taught you to ignore when someone has their headphones in and they just need a moment to relax.”
“I just came to say hi. I didn’t come here to kill your time. And relax from what?”
“Doesn’t fucking matter,” I said, overreacting in my tone a bit to her last question. “And you are killing my time.”
“From what?”
I bit my lip. From what, exactly? Listening to Queen’s Greatest Hits album that I’d already heard so many times? Slumping against the lockers?
“I don’t really understand why you’re so mean to me, you know,” she said. “I have never done anything but be nice to you. I try—”
I just laughed when I heard that. It came out much meaner than I meant it to, but if it had the effect of keeping Jackie under my control, well, good.
“It’s not being nice to me when you ignore my explicit instructions,” I said, and then I spotted an alternative that was better than this current situation. “Please respect the fact that I’m wearing headphones next time.”
With that, I walked past her, patting her on the shoulder, and nodded my head at Adam.
“Sup. You’re here early.”
“Yeah, perks of having my stepdad angry at me,” he said with an eye roll. “He decided that he’s going to punish me however he can, and he decided a good way to do that was force me to come to school as early as he does.”
“Wow, that sucks.”
“No shit, dipshit,” he said. I pursed my lips as I tried not to respond to that.
“Anyways, what do we have planned for this semester?” I said, trying to change the subject. “I feel like we didn’t really do anything that big or crazy last semester, you know? Like how you talked about—”
But Adam cut me off, waving his hand as a smile came to his face. I was smart enough to know that that meant only one thing, or rather, only one person.
“Sorry, man, but Emily has calmed me down.”
“What,” I said, more of an utterance than a question.
We all knew Adam had gotten softer since he started dating Emily—even with me, he wasn’t as mean, though that was relative. He was still probably firmly in the asshole category. But to not want to do something against his stepfather? That was practically a Collins tradition by this point.
I turned around and saw Emily and Jackie embracing and talking excitedly. How they had this much energy this early in the morning—what with it barely even being after seven—was beyond me. I’d only come here because I had a real shitty home life to avoid. They’d come this early because… one of them was punished and the other wanted to support him and her friend maybe wanted to support her?
I didn’t know. My eyes, honestly, remained on Jackie’s dress.
“That’s what I have planned right now,” Adam said with a cocky smirk.
I saw Nick walking down the other end of the hallway to us. I nodded to him as Adam walked past him and hugged Emily before kissing her—and by kissing her, I mean to an embarrassingly social degree. Emily even tried to push away from him, but there was no getting Adam off of her at this point.
“Geez, I think this is how porn starts,” I muttered as Nick came close to me.
Nick grunted under his breath, muttering something about how it was bullshit this was a thing. It hit me then that it was Emily that Nick had taken to homecoming; it was Emily that Nick had admitted to liking. He’d said as much to me, but for obvious reasons, he had never said anything to Adam. It may have been hard on Adam, but I guess it was hard on him, too.
Didn’t mean I wasn’t going to give him shit for it a little bit, though.
“Jealous?” I said.
Nick sighed.
“I shouldn’t be,” he said. “I knew Emily’s never really been into me, much as I try otherwise. But between Adam pulling off the fucking heist of our high school lives and all the bullshit with football and basketball…”
He didn’t finish his sentence. Adam and I both knew where his anger lied—in his genetics and in the football coaches that had recruited his brother but had not yet given him much of anything. In fact, for as much as Nick had spent the last summer talking about getting a scholarship somewhere and for him to have nothing to date, I had to imagine that he was in a dark place now.
“Looks like the Broad Street Boys might be down to just us,” I said. “Guess the Locke residence is going to become party central for our last semester, huh?”
Nick didn’t say a word, becoming like a ghost in the background as more students started to trail in. It didn’t take long for Emily, Adam, and even Jackie to disappear, the three of them swarmed and hidden by my classmates.
I couldn’t help but wonder as they vanished from view if the bill for four and a half years of fake friendship had finally caught up. I couldn’t help but wonder if, instead of spending my first semester in the Providence Prep family alone, I was now destined to spend my last one alone.
5
JACKIE
SIX AND A HALF YEARS AGO
I HAD NEVER FELT SO happy and so grateful to my parents.
I’d spent the last year telling them that I needed a more challenging school than the one I was at right then. I kept telling them that whatever they had thought about me attending the public schools, it wasn’t enough. I wanted to be the most productive biologist there ever was, and I couldn’t do it in the Tennessee public school system.
For most of the year, my parents had told me they didn’t have the money to do it, that while they valued living off of the land and being removed from the world, it had its costs in interacting with modern society. There were a lot of terms I didn’t understand, or only had a rudimentary understanding of, but I knew enough to get the hint—I wasn’t going to go to a private school. I’d have to supplement the public education with my own learning.
And then, a week before school had started, they broke the news to me. I was going to Providence Middle. They’d gotten enough scholarship money to afford tuition for me.
And now, here I was, showing up to school on my first day, excited as could be.
Then I saw that everyone had on their school uniform except me.
I felt mortified. I hadn’t even known that I was supposed to wear a school uniform! Instead, I was dressed in a sunflower dress with flats. I didn’t look at all like I belonged. What was I doing here?
“Mom!” I said as she drove the Jeep up to
the house.
“Jackie, you will be fine,” she said. “Connect to your peers. Reach their souls. What you wear on the outside does not matter.”
“Mom! That’s stupid!”
“It’s only stupid if you do not try to connect on a level beyond the simple clothing that you wear,” she corrected, words that drove me crazy. Could she not see that I was in for a world of embarrassment and mocking? “Just do the best you can. Remember. They cannot make fun of you if you embrace it. If they say you look ugly, say you wanted to try and look ugly today. If they say you look weird, say it makes you stand out.”
I had no idea why—there was nothing special about what she had said, and I heard it before—but I decided to give it a try. Maybe it was having no friends here that meant there were no real stakes to what I did. Maybe it was knowing that my parents would probably have to pull me out after a semester anyways.
It didn’t matter. I vowed to do what I could to stand up for the clothing I had on, which I would have liked in any other circumstance.
When I got out of the car, the first thing I did was I went up to the principal, Victoria Peters.
“Hi, I’m new, I’m Jackie.”
“Jackie White?” Ms. Peters said.
“You know me?”
“I do,” she said with a smile. “Welcome to Providence Middle. I know we accepted you just last week.”
“Yes, and I didn’t know about the dress—”
She cut me off right there, her warm smile reassuring me.
“We didn’t expect you to have something ready this quickly,” she said. “Just get clothes as soon as you can, OK? If you have any problems, you come to me immediately.”
“OK, thanks, Ms. Peters.”
School couldn’t have started any better. I connected with my teachers and my elders than most people my age, anyways, so this was, in some ways, better for my confidence than making friends with others.
I had to admit, I heard the whispers and the giggles as I walked through the hallway. I found my way to the homeroom I had with Mr. Meade, who apparently had all of the students with last names V-Z, without showing any bother, but it did hit me a little bit. Still, I remembered what my mother said, and I walked with my head held high.