by Jacob Allen
Emily chuckled.
“You’re sweet, Jackie, never let anyone forget that,” she said. “Yeah. I’ll be fine tomorrow. I’m just giving Adam my own sort of punishment.”
I chuckled at the idea.
“It’s funny, I’d almost say you could reward Kevin for what he did,” she said. “For the way Adam pushed him around, it’s about time someone kicked his ass.”
“That’s quite a thing to say!” I said with a laugh.
“Hey, he’s great to me, but he needed to learn to be great to everyone else. I’ve gotta go, though. Text me, OK?”
I smiled and offered her a hug. She hesitated, clearly eager to get out, but she took it. As she left, I only felt more resolute about what I would do now.
I would give Kevin a chance at a date. I could see now he truly cared about me, or at least stood up to me. If the date went well, he’d get me at Sadie Hawkins. If the date didn’t, then I could recognize that his words weren’t in protection of me, but just the bully not being bullied around. I could finally, truly move forward from Kevin and wish him well.
Maybe I was doing some weird sort of mental gymnastics, but I truly felt like this was the right kind of standing up for myself. I wasn’t being totally selfish, but I was setting boundaries.
Time would tell if this was the right move for both of us.
12
KEVIN
“DEAR DIARY,
Today sucked ass.”
I literally wrote those words down with twenty minutes to go in detention because I was just so damn bored. With it only being the second day of school, I still didn’t have enough homework to occupy the two hours spent in that room. I was reduced to being an insane person, pretending I was in some sort of moving, writing to my diary. What was I, some fucking school girl?
It was better than being a giant asshole like the guy seated one seat over from me. He’d looked at me a couple of times during the detention, as if he was going to say something—and with the way the detention proctor went in and out of the room, that wouldn’t have been difficult—but like the fucking coward that he was, he didn’t say a word. Figured. The bullies were always tough and ballsy until you fought back, and then they whimpered like the punks that they were.
The Broad Street Boys, at least as far as it being a four-person group, was done and over with. I would say I’d go back to feeling exposed and vulnerable with Jackie, but apparently even she had had enough of me, choosing to ignore me this morning. Well, fuck her too.
I was going to get through this last semester as quickly as possible. I wasn’t going to attend any events. I wasn’t going to walk across the stage at graduation. I was going to take my mandatory classes, take my final exams, go home, and do whatever I could to stay out of the house. I’d get two jobs. I’d volunteer.
Anything that took me away from having to spend time with either my father or the Broad Street Boys was a win in my book. Anything in which I didn’t have to stress over this bullshit was a major notch in the cap.
“I am going to leave for about fifteen minutes to take a phone call,” the proctor, a math teach named Mr. Sanders, said. “I expect you two to remain in your seats, silent. If I come back and you two are doing anything other than work, I will recommend to Mr. Collins that the two of you remain in detention for at least another week. Nod if you understand me.”
We both nodded, but we would have done that even if he’d spoken to us in Portuguese. He left the room then, shutting the door carefully behind him. I thought of what more I could write in this diary. Maybe I’d create an entire journal about them; I could call them the Detention Dialogues. That would be funny. I—
“I’m sorry.”
I swore time froze when I heard Adam say that. I turned to him, stunned.
“What?”
I wasn’t convinced he wasn’t being a smartass yet. There was a part of me that was terrified of the possibility that he was going to troll me again, and that he was intent on encouraging another fight he’d get out of. Granted, he was here right now, so at least for one day, the two of us were in the same boat. No connections or money could help him here.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to admit, though, I don’t understand why you got so mad. What was it I said?’
“What was it you said?” I said, in disbelief.
At least Adam was sincere that he didn’t understand. It prevented my tone from rising to that of outraged asshole, stabilizing at annoyed listener.
“Do you even listen to yourself when you talk sometimes? You call me puppy. You call me poor. You say I’m going to spend Sadie Hawkins at home jerking off thinking about Jackie while my father and I drink Bud Light. Like… come on, seriously?”
Adam bit his lip.
“You know I’m not any good at being nice,” he said.
“I hope you’re not using that as an excuse.”
“I’m not,” he quickly added. “But I just always figured you took it in stride and could laugh about it.”
“Well, maybe I should have made it more obvious before, but no, there are some things I don’t take well in stride. You think someone who comes from a poor part of town likes being fucking reminded about how poor they are?”
Adam started to talk, but I cut him off.
“I’m not gonna give you some stupid ass privilege speech. I don’t give a shit about that. I just don’t like you throwing it in my face all the time that I’m poor. You know I drive a 20th century car. You know that I can’t afford schools like you can. You know from previous experience that I’m very self-conscious about this kind of thing. Yet you continue to thrust it upon me and remind me? Like, fuck, man.”
“I could have done better with that,” Adam admitted in what might have been the biggest understatement I’d ever heard from him.
Still, just to hear him even admit that was a huge change from the person he once was. That he could even say he was sorry and say that he had done better implied humility, which implied he had something he never had before.
“What else?” he asked.
“Guess we’re getting it all out of the way, huh?” I said with a snort.
I stared down at the desk. There were some deeper, more painful things I wanted to get to.
Not yet.
“You call me your puppy, and bro, come on, give me a better nickname than fucking puppy,” I said. “I help the Broad Street Boys out because I like you guys, not because I’m your bitch. I know I’m the big dude who looks like a bouncer. I’m not afraid to play one at your parties. That doesn’t mean I’ll do anything you want when we’re at school.”
“Yeah, I got nothing,” Adam said. “It just slipped out one day and I liked it.”
“Well, maybe you should have thought of how I’d fucking like it.”
“You could have said something.”
“Hey, this is not about me.”
“Yeah but Kevin, come on. You talk shit as much as anyone in the group. Definitely more than Nick.”
I chuckled.
“Anyone does more than Nick.”
“Anyone just says things more than Nick. In any case, you talk trash too. It’s how we bond. I call Ryan a piece of shit. Nick calls us assholes. You tell us to get our shit together. I call all of you pussies. That’s what boys do.”
He had a point. If Jackie or Emily were listening, I knew they’d be wide-eyed and cringing at the idea of us talking to each other like this, but we were pretty public about it.
“Call me an asshole, sure,” I said. “Call me a motherfucker, a punk, anything that has truth in it, sure. Call me a puppy, like I’ll just follow you around wherever you go and I’ll sit in your lap? I’ll sit in your lap and fucking bite you to make sure you never call me that again.”
“Alright, alright, fair enough,” Adam said.
He was probably approaching his limit, but I hadn’t even gotten to the most important thing yet.
It was time to do so.
“And honestly, bro
,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I sometimes don’t even know if I belong in the Broad Street Boys.”
“What?”
For the first time all conversation, Adam’s tone shifted from neutral and data gathering to actually concerned. He actually looked sympathetic and amicable, not just professional and distant.
“It’s an accumulation of all of this shit,” I said. “I’m poor. I don’t actually live on Broad Street. Whoever I sleep with invariably wants to sleep with you, Ryan, or Nick. I don’t drive a sports car. Hell, the first time I met you, in the hallway of eighth grade, you had much cooler phones than I did. Still do.”
Adam snorted.
“This piece of shit?” he said, pulling out a device that had multiple cracks and concrete scars on it.
“Still nicer than mine,” I said, showing a phone that was now about four years old—ancient in phone years.
“Jesus.”
“I think even Jesus would be offended at the poor quality of this phone,” I joked. “But in any case, man. I also started out by doing things for you. So when you say all this shit, it just makes me wonder if I’m even friends with you or if you just like having me around as, well, your puppy. Your big, mean puppy.”
“Dude, not at all,” Adam said. “You know that shit yesterday, when I came up to you after PE? Told you about Jackie? What I didn’t tell you was she wanted to know more about you. I didn’t tell her shit. We’re a brotherhood, man, and there are things I tell you all that I would never tell Emily.”
“Bro, you tell her everything,” I said laughing.
Imagine my surprise when Adam didn’t also start laughing or crack a smile.
“I take the Broad Street Boys very fucking seriously,” he said. “I sure as hell don’t have anyone else that I can trust. So if you think that you’re not a valued member of the club, think again, asshole. Because you are.”
“See, that works,” I said. “I like asshole. If you’d called me puppy, we’d be in detention through our college years.”
“I’d like to see the old man try,” Adam said.
“He would.”
“Fucker wouldn’t get shit,” Adam said. “And in any case, he and my mother have been more distant in the past couple of months.”
Oh, shit. Something happened in that house that we don’t know about. No one’s going to know about it.
“You think they’re—”
“I fucking hope so,” Adam said.
And then he asked me a question I never expected him to say.
“You’d still be friends with me even if my family lost its money because of a divorce, right?”
Frankly, that question was harder to answer than I cared to admit. At least, it was at first when I only considered previously weighed evidence.
But this right here, this detention conversation, this was revealing things to me that I had never given Adam credit for. It was showing me a side of him that I had really failed to account for or even believed existed.
“A few years ago? Probably not,” I said, deciding honesty was the best approach. “But hearing you say this, it reinforces what I already knew. When you’re not being a massive jackass, you’re a decent guy. Not a great guy, just decent.”
I added the last line at the end as a joke, and it was very rewarding to know that Adam got it.
“We can’t be having people thinking I’m a great guy now, can we?” he said with a snort. “We have to maintain some appearances at Providence Prep.”
“Duh. Half our appeal is that we’re too ruthless and cold to be fucked with.”
“Damn straight,” Adam said.
“Broad Street Boys aren’t bitches.”
“No, no we are not, not in the slightest.”
And then I laughed at another memory.
“Besides, if all I cared about was your money, do you think I would have called you out for your previous treatment of Emily? And do you think I would have tried to stuff your face into a locker?”
“Nope, because your ass would be sued for emotional distress till kingdom come.”
“Who’s the bitch ass puppy now?”
We shared a laugh at that but quickly went silent when we thought we heard footsteps coming from down the hallway. We gave it a few seconds before we both decided Mr. Sanders had not, in fact, returned from his fifteen minute break. A quick glance at my phone confirmed that, giving us about five minute left.
“I do gotta say something, if we’re in the spirit of being painfully honest,” Adam said. His choice of adverb was not lost on me. “I know I treated Emily like shit, and I know I pushed you all away as much as I could whenever you mentioned it. I deserved shit for that. But I’d be disingenuous if I didn’t say anything about your treatment to Jackie.”
“Are we gonna have a real discussion about this, or are you going to mock me again for not going to Sadie Hawkins with her?”
“It’s real,” Adam said. “Maybe with a joke or two. But it’ll be real.”
Goddamnit. OK. He took his beating a second ago. You can take yours.
“Go ahead,” I said with some exasperation in my voice.
“She’s been nothing but nice to you since you’ve known her,” he said. “I haven’t really given a shit for a long time because I was wrapped up in my own head with the shit with Emily, but now that that’s taken care of, I really notice it with you two. She comes up to you every day before school and wishes you good morning. Nine out of ten times, you just ignore her, and on the tenth, you’re a mean asshole to her.”
“I just want to be left alone then, isn’t that obvious by the headphones?”
“Bro,” Adam said, patting both hands on his desk. “No one is asking you to have a first date conversation with her there. No one is asking you to have a debate on stage with her. Just a simple head nod or something like that would go a long way.”
“I guess,” I said weakly, even though I knew full well he was right.
“No, no fucking guessing, I know I’m right.”
I supposed after that, I was due for another confession.
“You know, this morning, when I launched at you—”
“Hell of a fight, right?”
“I mean, I hope someone recorded it. I think I got some good licks in, but your hip bucking was pretty good.”
“Oh, this shit still hurts,” Adam said with a laugh. “But—”
The door opened. We immediately went back to reading and me writing some bullshit in my “diary” as Mr. Sanders stared at the two of us.
“I know I heard you two talking.”
We both looked up and shrugged, pretending to be unsure of what he was saying.
“If one of you can tell me that the other was talking, I’ll take away your detention for the week.”
The appeal of going to my father and saying my sentence was reduced was certainly promising.
But the problem was assuming my father would be sober enough to recognize that my sentence getting reduced was a good thing, or that he’d even remember. In fact, even if he was happy today, there was no guarantee for later. In some ways, since the bleeding had already started, it didn’t much matter if I bled out to death or if I just had a scab.
Plus… Adam really was a kind of brother to me now.
And, proving that he meant what he said, he didn’t say a goddamn word either. Even if it meant taking away from the ability and time for him to potentially be with Emily.
“You have half an hour left,” he said. “Spend it wisely.”
The funny thing about detention, we soon realized, was that it was almost a blessing for us. Over the next few days, as we served our term, we spent our two hours after school getting into a variety of heavy and serious issues. Adam talked about his struggles with his stepfather. I spoke about mine with my own father.
We shared the story of losing a loved one, with Adam losing his father and me my mother. We talked about hopes for the future. Of course, we also talked about stupid shit, like the g
irls Ryan was going for, the crazier girls in our class, or the guys who’d gotten cited for underage drinking. But it was really a turning point for Adam and I. We got closer in our friendship.
It was almost like the fight was the necessary event to allow us to get closer together.
One topic, though, remained untouched until Friday. And so when we resumed our conversation when Mr. Sanders went on detention break, Adam went right to the thing that Mr. Sanders had first interrupted that Tuesday.
“So what’s going on with Jackie?”
I sighed.
“Same old shit as Tuesday,” I said. “She won’t look at me right now.”
“How do you feel?”
“It’s driving me fucking crazy!” I blurted out before I could more carefully consider my words. “God, damnit that feels strangely good to admit. But I’m so used to her just being all over me, doing whatever I want, for her to suddenly just pull it away, it’s like I’ve lost a drug I once had.”
“Except the drug was fucking sweet and good for you, with side effects like elevated mood.”
“Oh, please.”’
“You never tried to fight me whenever Jackie was giving you attention.”
“Hah, true,” I said. “But I’m not sure what this means going forward.”
Adam sighed, putting his head in his hands for exaggerated effect.
“It means you go up to her, you apologize or, at least, try and be nice to her, and then you give her reasons to ask you to Sadie Hawkins. Or, hell, ask her yourself. She likes you, you know.”
“Right, but what the fuck am I supposed to do?” I said. I knew I was overcomplicating this.
“Be a fucking man and rope her back in!” Adam said, his voice getting a little higher in volume than I wanted. “Look, man, I’m not saying you’re not a man. That came out a little strong.”
He’s compensating for it. Guess that’s a good thing, though he better not go too far or I’m gonna start calling him puppy.
“I’m just saying, you know what you need to do. So go do it.”
On a simple level, yes, I knew what I needed to do. I needed to get over myself and stop acting like such a coward before Jackie. I needed to just put forward the truth and let her decide.