by Amy Bryant
It wasn’t really sex I wanted, though. I was still kind of afraid to have sex. I wanted other things. Boyfriend things. I wanted Mike to rest his hand on my thigh when he sat next to me, like Lyle did with Carrie. I wanted him to miss me when I wasn’t there, or at least tell me that he did. We’d been going out for three months. I wanted him to tell me that he loved me.
Mike and I were different from other people. We didn’t fit in at school. We had the same sense of humor. We didn’t like sports or school dances or extracurricular activities. We were loners in black clothes, poets imprisoned in the suburbs. We loved cities and hated nature. We loved vintage cars and hated acid-washed jeans. We were fans of punk rock music and John Waters movies. We detested bops and Christians. We loved our mothers and hated our fathers. We didn’t belong in Reston. We were lucky to have found each other.
I broke up with him over the phone a few days later. It wasn’t something I planned. Mike wanted us to take acid and watch The Wall over at Adam’s house. One of my relationship rules was that I didn’t go over to Adam’s.
“I’m not doing that.” I said it like he had invited me to a square dance at his church.
“Why not?”
I sighed. I could hear his guitar. “For one thing, I’ve already seen The Wall.”
“But every time you see it, you notice more things,” Mike said. “And you have to see it on acid. Have you ever seen it on acid?”
“Maybe we could do something else instead,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Like go out to dinner or something.”
“You want to trip and go out to eat? I can never eat when I’m tripping. And I can tell you right now Adam’s not gonna wanna do that.”
I stared out my bedroom window. Next to the streetlight a calico cat I didn’t recognize was stretched out on the roof of our neighbor’s pale green Honda. William was right.
“Mike?”
“What?”
“Do you want to just be friends or something?”
He stopped playing guitar. “Is that what you want?”
I sat down on my bed. My stomach felt like it was full of clay. “I’m asking you,” I said.
“Yeah, I guess,” he said.
We were quiet. I could hear Mike’s breathing. I unclasped the fishhook bracelet from my wrist and threw it across the room. It made a pinging sound against the mirror and fell into the laundry basket. He hung up without saying good-bye.
I made an X with my arms and legs on the bed. My hands and feet dangled off the sides, and I waited for the blood to rush there. The clay feeling in my stomach had gone away, and now I felt like I had gotten the wind knocked out of me.
I sat up and called Theresa. “I’ll be right over,” she said. “I’ll tell my mother that I need help with math.”
I went downstairs to the basement and told Mom and William that Theresa was coming over to get help with math. They were watching a British mystery on PBS.
“Okay, honey,” Mom said. I lingered in the doorway. I couldn’t decide whether to tell them about Mike. It felt rude to interrupt their show, and PBS didn’t have commercials. I waited for one of them to ask me what was wrong. I wanted it to be like when Mom told me I could quit the drill team. All I had to do was burst into tears, and she would take care of me.
On TV a scruffy, nerdy investigator was questioning a red-faced, overweight housecleaner. “And how long have you known about Mrs. Shervington’s previous marriage?” he demanded. I went back upstairs and put on my coat and hat.
When Theresa showed up we headed for the neighborhood playground. It was deserted, and the jungle gym looked naked, like some sort of modern sculpture instead of something kids played on.
I lowered myself into a swing and kicked at the sand underneath me. “God, this place is just like one giant cat box,” I said.
Theresa leaned over to light my cigarette. Her gloves smelled of tobacco. When I lifted my cigarette to my mouth, I noticed that my wrist felt lighter without the fishhook bracelet.
“There’s something to be said for being free,” Theresa said. “I like it.”
“I know,” I said. “But I liked being Mike’s girlfriend, too.”
“That’s weird.”
“What?”
“What you said. That you liked being Mike’s girlfriend. Not that you liked Mike.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Why’d you break up with him, then?”
I thought about it. “I don’t know. It was just like all of the sudden it seemed like things had gotten so…pointless.”
“Yeah. I can see that.”
“Did it seem that way to you?”
“Pointless?”
“Yeah.”
“God. I don’t know. How would I know?”
“Well. We weren’t exactly Carrie and Lyle material.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“Well.”
“Oh please,” Carrie said when I told her I didn’t want to sit at the lunch table anymore. “Everyone is as much your friend as Mike’s.”
We were at my locker, which was decorated with several of Mike’s drawings. I hadn’t decided what to do with them yet.
“You can sit by me. Everybody will think I’ve got two chicks,” Lyle said. He put one arm around me and the other one around Carrie. I laughed. Carrie gave Lyle a look. Lyle took his arm away and said he was just kidding. I slammed my locker shut and followed them into the lunchroom.
The stench of cafeteria food and the closeness of the lunch crowd was almost too much to bear. I kept my head down as I made my way through the food line. I wasn’t hungry in the least. I finally settled on a soft pretzel and a grape juice.
“That’s not much of a lunch,” the lady at the register said as I paid her.
“I have an eating disorder,” I muttered. I felt faint. Mike was already at our table, chatting away with Adam. He was wearing a navy blue sweater I hadn’t seen before, which unnerved me.
I sat down at the end of the table, as far away from Mike as I could get. He picked up his sandwich and came over next to me and sat down. He was having his usual sandwich, tuna salad that he brought from home.
“How are you doing?” he said.
I got up and moved next to Chris L. and Chris S. Mike followed me. I got up and moved, and he followed me again.
“Come on, I know you still like me,” he said, loud enough for everyone at the table to hear. “Let’s at least talk about it.”
The sick feeling I had carried around with me all day was going away. “I don’t want to talk to you,” I said.
“Come on, Polly. I know I’m an asshole sometimes.”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “This is a joke, right?”
“Look. I said I know I’m an asshole. So will you just drop this and be my girlfriend again?”
“Is that a new sweater?”
“Come on. I’m asking you to get back together with me in front of everybody.”
I stared down at my soft pretzel. This was the last thing I had expected.
“Don’t fall for it, Polly,” Theresa said.
“At least go to another table or something,” Adam said.
Mike pushed his chair back and stood up. “Polly, I’m ordering you to get back together with me right now!” His hands were flung wide, and his cheeks were red. He was acting like one of Bethany’s drama boyfriends.
I beamed. “Okay, you win,” I said.
“I thought you’d wised up about that twerp,” William said when I called him for a ride home from Mike’s.
“I have wised up,” I said. If I hadn’t broken up with him, Mike wouldn’t have been so affectionate in the lunchroom. It wasn’t like Jason. This time it was going to work out.
Friday night Massive Hemorrhage practiced. This was a better practice than usual, as Lyle’s mother was out of town with her boyfriend and we’d gotten a case of beer. I basked in the faint scent of damp boxes mixed with the mo
re generic scent of Lyle’s house, a smell as familiar to me now as the harsh overhead lighting and the scratchiness of the couch.
After practice was over Mike squeezed himself next to me on the couch and kissed me on the lips. He was sweaty from playing, and his T-shirt stuck to him in places. I set my empty Milwaukee’s Best can on the floor. Mike put his arm around me and I rested my head on his shoulder.
“Good practice,” I said.
“Yeah, some of it,” Mike said. “We need more songs before we play out, though.” I held his hand in my lap and ran my fingertips over his calluses while he drank his beer with his other hand. He wasn’t stoned tonight. I liked him this way.
There was a rap at the sliding glass door. Lyle turned down the stereo and yanked the curtains aside. It was Adam and a boy I didn’t know. The boy was wearing a leather motorcycle jacket and his short bleached hair was spiked up like Billy Idol’s.
“You guys know Todd,” Adam said when they stepped inside.
“Hey,” Todd said. His voice sounded familiar.
Lyle turned the stereo back up and everyone started talking again. I watched as Todd crossed the room to the case on the floor and helped himself to a beer. He straightened back up and walked straight over to Mike and me. He cracked his beer open and stared down at us. I was getting a bad feeling.
“What’s going on, Todd?” Mike said.
“Are you Polly?”
“Yeah.”
Todd’s eyes raked over me. “You’re the one who fucked my brother,” he said.
Todd didn’t look a whole lot like Jason. Their coloring was similar but Todd was taller and his nose was slightly larger and more crooked. He had a cruel, dominant air about him that Jason lacked.
“Jason and I broke up a long time ago,” I stammered.
“I guess I should thank you, ’cause Jason was a virgin.” Todd’s voice was tinged with ridicule. “I thought he was gonna die a virgin.”
Adam laughed. “Who wants a smoke?” he said.
I felt myself redden as Todd’s words sank in. Jason had been a virgin like me. And still I hadn’t been good enough.
Todd followed Adam outside and I made myself look over at Mike. He had grabbed his guitar from the side of the couch and was busying himself over a broken string.
“Well,” I said. My voice cracked like a boy’s. “That was weird. What a fucking jerk.”
I waited for Mike to say something, but he just shrugged and pulled at his string. He didn’t look angry. I crossed one leg over the other and sighed. Mike knelt in closer to his guitar. I got up to get another beer before it was time for Carrie’s curfew.
It happened Monday, as we were walking from my locker to first period. When we reached his classroom Mike paused in the doorway.
“I think we should break up.”
I’d been talking about how I thought Massive Hemorrhage was ready to play a real show. Now I looked down at the floor, coming to focus on a silver gum wrapper.
“Why?” I asked.
“I don’t know, it just seems like it’s stupid for us to keep going out. I mean, let’s face it. It’s not like we have something important going on here.”
I forced my gaze to his face.
“Oh,” I said. The bell for first period rang, and a boy with hair the same auburn color as Carrie’s squeezed his way in between us and into the classroom. Two others followed him.
“Well, see you later then,” Mike said.
It wasn’t until he turned around that I realized that he was wearing my Bad Brains shirt.
“Hey!” I called after him. He walked to a desk in the back row and sat down, sliding his backpack to the floor.
Instead of going to class I went upstairs to the second floor. The final bell rang, and the hallway abruptly emptied out. Doors slammed shut. I inched along, pausing to look through each classroom window for Theresa.
She was sitting in the far corner of the last classroom on the hall. Her head was propped up on her elbow, and her wavy hair spilled onto the desktop. I waited at the window until she looked up and saw me.
four JOEY
I thought about my father a lot after Mike and I broke up. I still wasn’t taking Dad’s calls, which came less and less often. I hated how I was supposed to accept his alcoholism, like a stutter or a lazy eye. I hated that he expected me to be nice to him—to make room for him in my life—just because he was my father. It was easy for Mom to be nice to him. She had William.
I thought about Dad’s love for the Beatles, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Three Stooges. And the thing he loved most: scotches with just a touch of water. I thought about his deep, scratchy voice that had taken on a slight twang the last few years. The slow, deliberate way he had of speaking. His stooped posture and disheveled light brown hair that was just like mine. His watery blue eyes. I thought about his indecipherable handwriting inside my birthday cards. He sent me childish cards, oversized and pink, illustrated with puppies and balloons.
In college Dad had been a psychology major and a biology minor. Now he worked at the airport. He loved planes, he said once, as if that explained it. I knew he couldn’t be making much more than minimum wage. He drove a white 1969 hardtop Mustang he’d inherited from his father when he died. It constantly needed work, but Dad hung on to it like it was the only thing he cared about. When I was younger he’d drive up and we’d go for rides. I loved the white leather seats, the chrome detailing on the glove compartment and the gearshift. There wasn’t a stray mark anywhere on the car, inside or out.
Now that Mike and I were over, I didn’t have anyone to talk to about Dad. We were supposedly still friends, but we avoided each other as much as we could. We sat at opposite ends of the lunch table, and I didn’t go over to Lyle’s for band practice anymore. We broke up in February, and I didn’t stop moping until April, when I met Joey.
I was at a Dag Nasty show, and he was staring at me from behind the T-shirt table. His whole face was thin—narrow, crooked nose, small mouth with nonexistent lips, little eyes close together, eyebrows so dark they called attention away from his puffy, crayon-red hair. He was cute, in a clownish kind of way. I was in the bathroom line, and at first I hadn’t been sure he was looking at me. But as the line moved his gaze followed me. I smiled and looked down at the floor. I wasn’t used to being looked at.
Dag Nasty’s set started as I was coming out of the bathroom. I hurried toward the front of the stage, snaking my way through the pit. Even though the T-shirt guy couldn’t see me from where he was sitting, I still had the distinct sensation of being watched.
Theresa came up beside me during “Thin Line.”
“That T-shirt guy likes you!” she shouted.
I rolled my eyes and turned my attention back to the stage. A skinhead was standing in front of the singer, preparing to dive. The crowd rolled back into us, and we put our arms up and pressed back. I could feel the sweat under the shirt of the boy I braced myself against, could see his shoulder blades moving up and down before he disappeared back into the pit and someone else replaced him.
“That guy selling T-shirts told me he likes you,” Theresa said after the last song was over. Her voice had the far-away, muffled tone that engulfed everything after a show. I lifted my sweaty hair off my neck and looked back over at the T-shirt table. He wasn’t sitting there anymore.
The crowd had bottlenecked at the exit, and we waited to get outside, inhaling the scent of perspiration and cigarettes. I could see Carrie, Lyle, and Adam waiting just outside the door. My legs were tired; I wanted to sit down. As the throng in front of us began to move again the T-shirt guy appeared before me. Theresa widened her eyes and surged forward with the crowd.
I waited for him to say something, but he stood rooted where he was, staring into my face. His hair was an even brighter red up close. He was taller than I would have thought, and so skinny he looked fragile. I felt myself flush, and let the crowd carry me past him. When I was almost by he tugged my sleeve and handed me a folded
-up piece of paper. I took it without looking at him and pushed myself the rest of the way outside. I jogged across the parking lot to catch up with the others. Halfway to the car I checked over my shoulder to see if he’d followed me outside. He hadn’t.
“What happened?” Theresa asked when I got to the car. Carrie already had the engine running.
I unfolded the paper, which was part of a flyer for an upcoming Verbal Assault show. In a boyish scrawl he had written, “I think your beautiful.”
“Oh, God,” I said. “How embarrassing.”
I put the note in Carrie’s outstretched hand while Theresa told everyone in the car how he had stopped her and asked about me. I pretended not to be interested.
“He wanted to know if you had a boyfriend,” Theresa said.
“What did you tell him?” I asked.
“Duh, I told him you didn’t.”
“I’ve seen that guy around,” Adam said. “He hits on everybody.”
“Even the boys?” Theresa said.
“He spelled you’re wrong,” said Carrie.
“Can you try to look at the road while you’re driving?” Lyle said.
“He could have talked to me,” I said. “He didn’t have to write me a note.”
I kept the note in my backpack. When my classes got boring I studied it. His handwriting was small and overly slanted; I thought he might be left-handed. He’d written only one measly sentence. I could forgive the spelling error, but why hadn’t he signed his name? Maybe the whole thing was some sort of a joke. I wasn’t a girl that strange boys approached. My mother was the sort of woman you’d call beautiful, but not me. I was skinny and gangly. I had bad posture. I was flat-chested. My face was too long. I had dry, limp hair, and most of the time I had dark roots showing under the bleached parts. Still, I couldn’t help hoping that his note was sincere.