Ballads of Suburbia

by Stephanie Kuehnert

  After the last song, we hit up a diner a few blocks away. Adrian continued to hold my hand beneath the table, so I knew what happened at the show wasn’t a fluke. Post-nourishment, we headed to Shelly’s even though it was after one a.m.

  A smattering of people passed a bowl around on the front porch. Harlan remained ever observant despite his heavy pot handicap. If my brother or Cass noticed my and Adrian’s handholding, they’d shrugged it off, but Harlan was on it.

  “I knew you guys would hook up!”

  My cheeks started to get hot, but they quickly grew cold again when Adrian dismissed Harlan’s remark. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said with an inscrutable expression. But then he asked me if I wanted to see if there was any beer left inside. Since Quentin and Cass didn’t follow us, I knew something was up.

  When we found the keg bone-dry, I grabbed two shot glasses from the bar, told Adrian, “I know where there’s vodka,” and led him up to Shelly’s bedroom.

  Adrian leaned against Shelly’s bed. After I produced the bottle of vodka from underneath it, he grinned at me. “What do we do now? Pillow fight?” He grabbed a lacy pillow from the bed, smacking me lightly in the leg with it. “Truth or dare?”

  “What do you think this is, a slumber party?”

  He smirked suggestively. “Maybe.”

  Wow, I’d figured maybe we’d talk about what was going on between us once we were alone, but maybe he just wanted to make out. Not entirely sure where I stood with that, I uncapped the bottle of Absolut and said, “Okay. Truth or dare?”

  “Dare,” Adrian answered automatically.

  “Umm…” I perused the room for inspiration. At a loss, I sat on the floor across from him and pushed the bottle his way. “Do three shots. Right in a row. No chaser.”

  When Adrian rolled his eyes I remembered how wasted he’d been the first time we met. Obviously this would be no problem for him. He did the shots without so much as flinching. Completely sober, he stared into my eyes. “Truth or dare?”

  Knowing I wouldn’t get off nearly as easily, I quickly replied, “Truth.”

  All he asked with a simple smile was, “Did you have a good time tonight?”

  “Yeah, I’m just bruised as hell.” I rubbed my left shoulder and arm. His hand followed my path, lingering on my forearm. His touch sizzled. “Is that it? That’s all you wanna know?”

  “Do I get a part two?”

  “I guess.” I snagged the bottle of vodka and did two quick shots, wincing from the burn.

  “Pain relief?” he quipped.

  “Yeah,” I lied. Truthfully, I was trying to quell my anticipation. I wanted to touch him like he’d touched me, maybe even kiss him, but I didn’t have the guts to do it. I really hoped his next question would involve asking me out.

  But consistently unpredictable, Adrian’s hand dove under the thin fabric of my long-sleeved shirt and grazed the raised red lines beneath. “Why do you do it?” His voice was low, inappropriately seductive.

  I jerked my arm away. “That’s none of your damn business. If that’s your question, I’ll take a dare instead.”

  “Fine.” He rocked himself forward and pressed his lips against mine. Hard. His tongue probed my mouth. His teeth scraped my bottom lip. All very intentional. All very good. I was truly breathless when he pulled back and sat cross-legged in front of me, nothing touching but our kneecaps.

  I blinked for a moment and repressed an urge to stammer. This was a test. I needed to act as cool as he did. “Your turn. Truth or dare.”

  He nodded, obviously impressed by my recovery. “Truth.”

  This time my gaze fell upon his arms. I gestured at the “Thrown” tattoo on his right forearm and then the “Away” on his left. “What’s it mean and where’d you get it?”

  “That’s two questions.”

  “You asked two questions.”

  “You didn’t answer one.”

  “I took the dare instead,” I pointed out, offended.

  “Was that a dare?” he retorted, mock offended.

  “Fine. Tell me the story behind the tattoo and I’ll answer your second question.”

  Adrian inclined his head slightly. “Deal. I’ll even tell you the real story, what I wrote in the notebook. My ballad, as you would call it.

  “I got the tattoo in New Orleans. I went down there last year.” He inhaled sharply through his nose and pushed his long hair over his shoulders. “I had a big blowout with my parents. My adoptive parents. They kicked me out, so I went to where I was born to try to find my real parents.”

  “Did you?”

  Adrian didn’t answer directly. “I got ‘Thrown Away’ tattooed because nobody wants me. Not the people who conceived me and not the people who worked so hard to get their white American baby. “Cause those are the hardest kind to get, you know.” He flashed a sarcastic, game-show-host grin. “The tattoo is a reminder that even though nobody wants me, I’m fuckin’ here anyway.”

  He looked at me expectantly; time to keep up my end of the bargain. I didn’t have a grand story like his. I discovered cutting through becoming blood sisters with Stacey, sure, but that was so cliché and really had nothing to do with why I kept doing it.

  I glanced at my left arm, visualizing all the little lines that crisscrossed my skin beneath my sleeve. “Maybe I should get a tattoo instead. I just don’t have words or an image to express the feelings I’m trying to release yet. Sometimes I hope the scars will form letters and spell it out.”

  “I know.” He nodded and tapped the thick, black a in the middle of “Away.” I saw faint lines like a fragile web behind the tattoo, hidden by the prominence of the dark ink.

  “You did it, too?”

  “Still do sometimes.”

  I was awed into silence, relating to this boy on a level I’d never dreamed possible.

  “A lot of people do it,” Adrian said.

  Thinking of the last person I’d told about cutting, I replied, “Not Maya.”

  “If she doesn’t, she wishes she could or she’s got something else she does to cope.” It was a bizarre gift he had, zoning in on the ugly truths people couldn’t admit. “Cass does it,” he informed me. Maya hadn’t told me that, but they kept family matters private. Adrian brought me into his tightly knit group when he added, “Quentin, too. That’s why you’re one of us.”

  A blood bond without the ritual Stacey and I performed.

  “And because you’re smart as hell and you can write. First your theory about ballads. Then the script you started today, wow.” Adrian’s eyes shone like a proud parent’s, but the devilish gleam broke through. He raised the stakes, surprising me like he had throughout our game of truth or dare. “That’s why you’re my girl,” he said with the slightest curl to his lips, so I couldn’t gauge the emotion behind his smile.

  I didn’t know if he meant I was his girlfriend or I was his friend who he identified with or what. But I decided I didn’t care and kissed him again. I liked kissing him. I decided that I would spend my summer with Adrian, going to shows, writing the “Stories of Suburbia” script, and, most important, kissing.

  The Ballad of a Throwaway: Adrian Matthews

  “We are the sons of no one, bastards of young.”

  —The Replacements

  December 1993

  EVERYONE WANTS TO KNOW THE STORY BEHIND the tattoo. It’s pretty hard to miss. Huge black letters down my forearms. Capital T-H-R-O-W-N on my right arm and A-W-A-Y down the left. In that fancy Old English scrawl, like all the rappers and the big skinhead dudes at hardcore shows get.

  I say, you know how people got tattooed in concentration camps? It’s kinda like that. This will always remind me that I survived the suburbs.

  It’s a shitty and un-PC thing to say, I know, but my shrink didn’t label me a sociopath for nothing. And if I’m not saying something like that I’m making up a story:

  I got it because my best friend and I got jumped. They shot us both for our sneakers
and threw us in a Dumpster. I survived. He didn’t.

  I got it because my father flew into a rage about a golf game and came home so pissed that he threw me off a balcony.

  I got it because my parents threw me out and I moved in with my mother’s best friend. She’s my sugar mama. It says “Picked Up” on my ass cheeks.

  I got it because I’m a Dumpster baby. You know, a chick on the cheerleading squad got knocked up, had me in the bathroom stall during prom, and tossed me out with the trash.

  I like good stories. That’s why I started to collect them. The newspaper clippings, my friends’ stories. The stories of suburbia, there’s some great ones, huh? I like to think my own story is a combination of the last two. Minus the sleeping-with-my-mom’s-best-friend and the thrown-in-the-trash parts. And I guess it’s about time I told it.

  My parents and I have had a hard time getting along since the beginning. My adoptive parents, I mean. Apparently, they brought me home when I was six months old and I cried for the next six months. Of course, I didn’t even find out I was adopted until sixth grade. I learned it in typical suburban fashion: at the shrink’s.

  I’d been forced to start seeing the shrink the year before because I was LD/BD/ADD—you name it, if it ends with a D for disorder, I got it. On the plus side, my whacked-out brain chemistry is how I met my best friend, Quentin. We were always in the principal’s office for acting out in class and the two of us started doing drugs together when we were eight. The legal ones: Ritalin, Adderall, Dexadrine. We traded them like baseball cards and took more than our prescribed dosages.

  Anyway, my parents told the shrink I was adopted and he decided they should let me in on the secret, so we had our first and only family session. Suspicious, I went in with my arms crossed and parked myself on a chair instead of with them on the couch. Dad just sat there while Mom clasped and unclasped her manicured hands and smiled her fake-ass smile. “You were born in New Orleans,” she began. I arched my eyebrows, but quickly settled back into a poker face.

  Mom and Dad spent a couple years doing all they could to combine their own genes, and when that failed, my barren mother window-shopped for babies like she’d once shopped for shoes. They’d scoured the country from New York to San Diego, but none of the babies were good enough.

  “Then we found you.” My mom squeezed her eyes shut, clasped her hands tighter, and I almost expected her to click her heels together three times like she was fuckin’ Dorothy trying to go home. She even resembled Judy Garland with the perfect coif of dark hair and the sparkle in her eyes masking the doped-up sheen. I’d always thought I’d inherited that hair from her, but apparently not. My hair had drawn her to me, though. “You were perfect, with that head full of big brown curls and the most soulful eyes I’ve ever seen.” Yep, “soulful eyes,” like a goddamn puppy dog. My mom, creative as a stick.

  As I listened to her, one thought played on a loop, These people aren’t my parents, that’s why I’m nothing like them. This was both liberating and frustrating because, well, who the hell were my parents? But by the end of the session, I was still too overwhelmed to ask. The shrink prescribed drugs and regular individual visits, more of the same. I did those things when I felt like it. Collecting the articles for my suburban scrapbook became my form of therapy.

  We had an assignment the first day of seventh grade where our social studies teacher handed out a stack of newspapers and told us we had half the period to find an article that interested us. Then we’d explain how it affected our lives. I found something in the Chicago Tribune about a fourteen-year-old girl who tossed her baby in the Dumpster after giving birth and went back to her honors English class. I carefully ripped it out and was the first to raise my hand when Mr. Baldwin asked who was ready to present. I summarized for the class, being sure to mention the gory details, like the bloody mess in the bathroom. I said, So that relates to me ’cause I’m adopted and that’s probably what my birth mother did to me when I was a baby.

  Jaws dropped. Mr. Baldwin had been warned in advance about me, like all of my teachers had been, so he took me outside and asked in a concerned voice if I’d taken my meds that day. When I claimed that I didn’t remember, he sent me off to the school shrink with a hall pass, but I just walked straight out of school with the article folded up in my back pocket. I eventually taped it into a fat, red, five-subject notebook that was meant for math homework. I’m sure the shrink would call creating the book a “meaningful act,” but everyone was so concerned about me ditching class, drinking, doing drugs, the typical crap, that I never got around to telling anyone but my friends about my opus to suburbia.

  I didn’t ask for the real deal about where I came from until the beginning of junior year of high school, when my parents and I had our biggest blowout.

  I dropped out of school today, I informed them at dinner while Dad scooped mashed potatoes onto his plate. The blue bowl smashed on the ice white ceramic tile. Dad finally lost it.

  Up until that point, he’d lectured me, grounded me, and despite my every defiance kept his cool like a champion chess player. But that night the face that was tanned by weekly golf games turned purple and everything he’d wanted to say came out. “No son of mine,” he growled.

  Technically, I’m not.

  Dad turned on my dazed mother. “You were the one who wanted this.” This meaning the adoption. This meaning me. “I told you that with somebody else’s kid there would be no predicting.” Yep, that was Dad, the accountant, a genius at logic, numbers, variables, and graphs. The more he spoke, the more I knew he’d always been distant not because I didn’t enjoy golf or math homework or anything he liked, but because I wasn’t his own flesh and blood. He made it clear he hadn’t been the one who picked me out or even wanted me. “We knew nothing about how they treated him in the first six months of his life.”

  Mom objected, “Wait! You said you knew they treated him well. He was your friend’s daughter’s kid.”

  “Not ‘friend,’ an old business associate. I never claimed to know about his personal life. You just had to have a baby…”

  I couldn’t believe they were talking about me like I was a dog that turned out not to be pedigreed. I wasn’t their troubled kid who they loved and wanted to care for. I was the poorly trained poodle who kept shitting on the carpet. Dad probably wished he could put me to sleep. I hated him so much. I imagined that he and his “business associate” had stolen me from my real mom. She probably missed me. She probably actually wanted me.

  It was my turn to break a dish. Lots of them. I threw things off the table, demanding, Who are my real parents? Where are they? Tell me now. Tell me right fucking now.

  Mom and Dad watched in horror as dishes, sloppy potatoes, dry meat, and slimy gravy hit the pristine floor. Mom fretted over how long it would take to clean up, and Dad shouted about how much it would cost to replace all this crap.

  And when the fight was over, the kitchen totally trashed along with any family bond the three of us had ever shared, the guy who raised me told me to get out, that I couldn’t come back until I followed his rules and went back to school and therapy. But in my mind, I’d won the argument, because when I threatened to start on the wedding china, the woman who raised me ran to her bedroom and came back with a page from her address book. My real mother’s info.

  But I wouldn’t even see what the inside of her house looked like. I made a fifteen-hour, NoDoz-fueled drive down I-55 to stand on her porch—if a house with columns like a Roman palace has something as lowly as a porch—and wasn’t even invited inside.

  When I arrived in the Garden District of New Orleans, I took one look at the mansion and figured it had to belong to my mother’s parents—my stodgy grandparents who had brokered the deal with the people who raised me.

  I figured they’d direct me to a graveyard and tell me I’d gotten my self-destructive genes from my real mom. She was a drug addict, that’s why my brain chemistry was out of whack. Or maybe she’d killed herself after they
made her give me up.

  If she wasn’t dead, she’d probably been disowned. In the five years since I’d found out she existed, I’d attributed everything about myself to her. I didn’t fit in with my middle-class, suburban classmates and, in my mind, she hadn’t either. I made weird collages and scrapbooks, so she had to be an artist of some sort.

  I never expected her to come to the door of a palatial mansion, summoned by a maid, no less, completely comfortable with what wasn’t just suburban housewifery but filthy, fuckin’ old-money rich. She carried herself like a little girl taught to walk with a book on her head. She’d perfected the patronizing smile meant for the help. She dressed high fashion, gave no hint she was hiding anything like tattoos or piercings or suicide scars or stretch marks from some illegitimate birth sixteen years earlier.

  The only thing I recognized of myself in her was the shape and shade of the brown eyes I saw in the mirror every day. And Pseudo-Mom must have been wrong about them being soulful, because Bio-Mom’s were completely soulless.

  She looked at me, this kid with rumpled, unwashed hair, bloodshot eyes, and stained, torn clothing, like I was dogshit on the bottom of her pricey shoes.

  Even though my own emotions were rioting, I had to mess with this woman’s world. She was the kind of chick I did that to, whether it was throwing fruit at her BMW or stealing her checkbook and buying more crap I didn’t need.

  I’m Adrian. I’m the kid you gave up, I told her.

  She didn’t blink for about a minute, but that was her only indication of emotion. Maybe we had the medication thing in common, too. Finally she asked, “What are you doing here?”

  I retorted angrily, What do you think? I wanted to know who my real parents are.

  She did the long blink thing again—I didn’t come to think of her as Bio-Mom just because of biology; she acted like a bionic woman. “Your real parents raised you.”

  No.

  We would have remained there, holding an intense staring contest as the humidity in the air built, but a shuffling sound came from the house and then the shrill voice of a little girl. “Mommy, it’s time to ride bikes!”