by Libba Bray
I move toward the back, stopping to pull the porn magazines out of their protective plastic coverings. The guy behind the counter’s watching me in the convex We See You So Don’t Even Think of Shoplifting Here mirror. Shit, there’s no way this guy’s gonna let me buy beer. I waste time picking up stuff I have no intention of purchasing: Cheap toy guns. Disposable razors. Cans of beans. Couple of snow globes. Jumbo packs of AlmostReal Fruit Leathers. Finally, I open the cooler, letting the frigid air wash over me, and grab a Rad Xtra Energy drink. If I’m going to be wired, I might as well go all the way. When I go for a bag of Corny Doodles, my coordination goes haywire. My muscles stiffen up; I grab hold of the wire display for support and send the whole row of chips to the ground.
“What do you think you are doing?” the clerk shouts in very precise English, like he’s been practicing. His name tag reads EMPLOYEE #12, and I wonder if he’s got a name or if his bosses just don’t give a shit what it is.
He’s yelling at me. “You think this is funny? You think this is a funny joke? Go on. Get out of here!” he shouts, pushing me through the front doors. “You are on drugs. Get going before I call the cops.”
Back in the parking lot under the hazy lights, I gulp in the air, trying to calm my body. My E-ticket meter flares, then fades, and when I look, Frontierland has been completely erased. I’m down two health bars, as Gonzo would say. I wish I had my soda. The chick in the fur vest is still standing there, a lollipop in her mouth. Underneath all that makeup, she’s not so old. Maybe fifteen. Sixteen. It’s hard to tell with girls.
“Whadjoodo?” she asks.
“I beat his high score on Captain Carnage. He’s pissed.”
She doesn’t laugh, and it depresses me.
She takes the lollipop out of her mouth. “If you wanna take something you have to put something on the counter first. Like you put a few candy bars there and ask if you can keep them on the counter while you get the rest of your stuff. They always say sure and then they think you won’t rip them off. They stop watching you.”
I’m not real sure on the etiquette for advice on shoplifting so I just say, “Cool. Thanks.”
Some guy drives up in a tricked-out SUV. “Tara, where the hell you been?” he shouts through the open passenger window.
Taking the lollipop out of her mouth, she yells back, “None of your fucking business!”
“Why you gotta talk that way? Let’s go to the party.”
Tara tosses the lollipop into the parking lot. “I’m out of cigarettes.”
“I got cigs. Who’s this?” he asks, nodding in my direction.
Great. Just what I need.
“Whaddyou care,” she says. “Maybe he’s my new boyfriend.”
“I just came here for a soda,” I say.
“Yeah? Where is it, then?” the guy in the SUV taunts.
If this were a movie, I would bust a secret move so fierce the entire place would be razed to the ground. I’d finish with something snappy like “And don’t forget my soda, punk” while I strolled off into the night. But it’s not a movie, and I just stuff my twitching hands into my pockets like the big mad-cow-disease-afflicted chickenshit that I am.
“You’re not the boss of me!” Tara shouts to the guy in the SUV. “I can do whatever I want. In case you forgot, we are broken up, Jus-tin!” She gives it a head swivel for added effect and puts her arm around my waist, which is basically like painting a target on my chest.
“I should be getting back,” I say, stepping away from her.
Jus-tin! turns on his inside car light. I can see he’s wearing a blue trucker hat and an oversized football jersey, and a huge diamond stud in his right ear. He’s got a scruffy brown beard. “Aw, come on, Tara. You don’t mean that, baby.”
She turns to me. “Do you have any cigarettes?”
“Sorry. No.”
“Can you get some?” she asks, sidling up to me. I notice with no small percentage of fear that the Justin guy looks like he could seriously kick my ass.
“That guy won’t let me back in,” I say, holding out my hands in a “sorry” pose. They’ve stopped spazzing, so there’s that, at least.
Employee #12 stands near the doors with his arms folded across his chest, letting us know we are not welcome in his Gas-It-N-Git lot. It’s a cops-will-be-called stance. An I-am-an-action-hero-of-the-all-night-mart stance. I wonder how he would sound saying “Don’t forget my soda, punk”?
“Dammit,” Tara says, chewing at a ragged nail. She saunters over to the open passenger window on the SUV. “Gimme a smoke.”
A lighted cigarette is passed through the window. She takes a deep puff, blows out some smoke, and just like that, opens the door and crawls in. There’s some intense kissing. Justin turns off the interior light.
“Okay, later,” I say, walking back toward the hulking shadow of the interstate.
“Wait!” Tara calls. She’s hanging out the window, her arms dangling, the cigarette stuck between her first and second fingers. “You wanna go to a party?”
We drive through the sleeping town. The traffic lights have gone to blinking yellows, and the streets glisten from an earlier rain. Tara tells me her five-minute life story. She’s fifteen. She lives with her mom, who works as a nail technician and brings home free polish and cucumber lotion to the trailer they share with four cats. “The whole dang bathroom smells like cucumber and cat poop, I swear,” she says, offering me a cigarette, which I decline. Tara hates school but loves a show about supermodels and wants to be one.
“She just did a boat show,” Justin tells me with a mix of pride and wariness. Like he only wants other guys to notice that he’s with a hot girl, not actually notice the hot girl herself. Justin’s eighteen but still a junior. He also lives with his mom and her “sorry-assed retard of a boyfriend” in a “crappy, two-bedroom apartment near Enormo-Mart.” For money, he bags groceries and sells the odd bit of pot, which is why hitting Brian Kinner’s party is “so vital.”
They finally ask me about myself. Usually I would edit my story, say as little as possible so I could stay in hiding mode. It’s been my M.O. my entire life—living just below the radar. But tonight, I’m so tired I just tell them everything. It feels good not to hold myself in check.
“Mad cow disease?” Tara says, exhaling smoke. “Is that something you get from sex?”
“No,” I say. “It’s not contagious.”
“Wow,” Tara says. “That’s so sad. Justin, don’t you think that’s so sad?”
“Yeah. Real sad. Hey, you wanna get high?”
Justin pulls the SUV over into the post office parking lot under a sign advertising that THE NEW CANCER STAMPS ARE HERE! and we smoke a joint. After the third or fourth toke, my head’s bobbing on my neck like one of those bobblehead toys you see on dashboards. Welcome back to Numbsville, population: one.
“Can’t wait to get out of this town,” Tara mutters, eyes closed, head lolling against her seat back.
Justin scratches at his scruffy attempt at a beard. His hair sticks out from under his trucker hat in long, scraggly wisps. “’S not so bad.”
Tara looks at him like he’s just said all babies should be euthanized. “Yes it is. It sucks.”
“I’m here,” he says quietly.
Tara snuffs out the joint. “I’m baked.”
“You cool back there?” Justin asks me.
“Ummn” is all I can manage in my semiconscious state.
“Time for a little fun,” Justin says.
He fires up the SUV and we drive through a neighborhood of insta-mansions—huge, sprawling houses, some with their own turrets. The walkways are lit up with in-ground electric torches. Alarm signs dot the edges of the lawns.
“Tara, take the wheel.”
Tara puts her left hand on it and we inch toward the curb. Justin pulls a baseball bat out from under his seat and leans his body out the side window. He swings the bat hard, knocking a mailbox off its stand.
“Whoa,” I say. Or at l
east, I think that’s what I say. I’m stoned. For all I know I could have said, “Board the cows! We’ve come to enslave your marigolds.” This makes me laugh, chuckling all to myself in the back.
Justin bangs away at the mailboxes. He misses one or two, which he blames on Tara’s driving.
“Fine. Drive yourself,” she says, pouting. But she doesn’t give up the wheel, and on the next one, he hits pay dirt. The mailbox is knocked completely clear of its post. It skips across the street with a grating clank, making little sparks on the asphalt. Lights flip on in the house. A dog barks with intent. Tara giggles high and loud. A stoner laugh. Justin tucks the baseball bat back under the seat and drives off fast. We run aimlessly up and down streets with names like High Court, Royal Acres, Imperial Lane, King’s Row, every street striving to be more important sounding than the last. Even the roads have aspirations here.
Justin rolls onto Westminster Lane. He cuts the SUV’s lights and slinks into the driveway of a dark house.
“Isn’t this the McNultys’?” Tara asks.
“Yeah,” Justin answers. “They’re away.”
“How d’you know?” she teases.
“My mom’s retard boyfriend cleans their pool. He said they’re in Spain or Portugal or some city like that.”
“Charlie McNulty is president of the student council at our school. He’s supersmart,” Tara explains, like a tour guide. It strikes me as funny and I laugh to myself.
“This way,” Justin says, taking us to the back. Around the side of the house is a wooden fence. Justin opens the gate into the backyard. The place is freaking huge. It’s got a nice stone patio with a huge gas grill, teak patio furniture, and a glass table with an umbrella shooting out of the middle. And there’s the pool Justin mentioned. It’s a clear blue that lets you see the pattern of red and yellow Mexican tiles around the sides. I can smell the chlorine coming off it.
Justin shucks his pants and shirt, getting down to his skivs. I’m afraid he’s going to take those off, too, but he doesn’t. He slips into the water in his underwear and pushes away from the side on his back. Tara’s having trouble with her clothes, but soon she’s down to her bra and underwear. I can see the outline of her dark hair against the thin pink fabric of her panties. It gives me a hard-on. No way I’m stripping down now.
“What’s the matter, Cameron? You shy?” She takes my hands in hers and starts pulling.
“No,” I protest, hoping she doesn’t steal a look below. “It’s my disease. I can’t swim. It’s not good for me.”
“Bummer,” she says before taking a flying leap into the pool. Water sluices up the sides for a good five seconds after. “I like making an entrance,” she says. “Otherwise no one notices you.”
In the end, I take my shoes off and stick my feet in, letting the lukewarm water lick at my ankles. It feels good, and not just because I’m stoned. I make a mental note to add this to Dulcie’s list of things worth living for. For some reason, I keep seeing her rolling her eyes at me, that big, goofy grin stretching her face like Silly Putty. On my private list, I add her smile. She doesn’t have to know.
“This is great,” Tara says. “When I’m a model, I’m buying a house just like this one. Maybe I’ll even buy this one from the McNultys and everybody who was ever mean to me can just eat shit when I’m all famous and everything.”
“Baby, you can build your own house,” Justin says.
“Yeah, I can, can’t I? Better than this one,” Tara giggles. She swims over to Justin and wraps herself around him, spider style. They float together like that, kissing. I look around the yard like I’m interested in the landscaping.
Tara laughs. “I think we’re embarrassing Cameron,” she says in a little singsong voice.
Justin gently pushes away from Tara and stretches for the side of the pool.
“Hey!” Tara says, treading water. “Where you going?”
“I gotta take care of business.”
Just like that, they climb out and dry off with some towels they take from a neat stack in a cabinet by the back door. They peel off their wet underwear. I look away and pretend I’m not getting another hard-on thinking about riding in an SUV with a girl who’s not wearing any panties.
“Let’s go,” Tara says once they’ve got their clothes on again.
“Hold up a sec.” Justin’s riffling through the sideboard of the grill. He pockets some BBQ sauce and a bottle opener.
“Should you take that?” I ask. My head’s starting to clear a little. It’s not as cottony.
“They have everything. They won’t miss it.”
When we get back into the SUV, Justin opens the glove compartment and tosses the bottle opener in there. It joins three more bottle openers, a cigarette case, some photographs of other people’s families, keys, and a dog collar.
“You take all that?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I like having their stuff. I like knowing they don’t win all the time.”
“Justin,” Tara whines. “We’re gonna miss the party.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” he says, real low and quiet.
Tara rolls her eyes and squeezes the water out of her pony-tail. “Gimme a cigarette.”
We drive out of the mansion neighborhood through a good-but-not-as-expensive one into an okay one, falling through the pecking order of neighborhoods till we’re in a run-down section with a bunch of ranch houses guarded by crappy, American-made cars and trucks.
Justin parks the SUV at the end of a long line of cars. We follow him down the street to the house where all the lights are blazing and party sounds blurp from the backyard. Two kegs are the only furniture in the back. Some kind of metal-rap mix blares from stereo speakers pulled out through the sliding glass doors and parked precariously on the uneven concrete patio.
A heavy guy in a black wrestling T-shirt greets Justin with a complicated handshake that ends with them both bumping chests. “Justin. Whassup?”
Justin shrugs, hands in his pockets. “Not much, bro. How’s the action?”
The big guy looks around. “So-so. Too many guys, not enough girls. Hey, Tara.”
“Hey, Carbine,” Tara says, taking a drag off a new cigarette. “This is Cameron. He’s dying of mad cow disease.”
Carbine nods at me. “Cool. Want a beer?”
“No, that’s okay.”
He hands me a full cup. “Here you go.”
“Thanks,” I say, taking it.
Carbine throws some playful punches to Justin, who fake wrestles him back, and I wonder who decided this was supposed to be the okay male greeting. Hi, good to see you. Let me show you how glad I am by beating the crap out of you.
They stop hitting each other and Carbine says, “Yo, Justin. Can we do a little bidness?”
“Lead the way, bro,” Justin says, and they disappear.
A guy walks up and takes the beer out of my hand, drinking it and handing me back the empty cup. Tara sees some girls she knows and runs over to whisper with them in a huddle like girls do. It’s in their DNA.
I wander through the house. A strip poker game has taken over the kitchen. One girl’s down to her bra and jeans. A guy’s sitting there in his tighty-whiteys. I grab a handful of chips and head into the living room. The guys stand around in clumps, eyeing the girls who sit on the couches, drinking and talking and waiting for the guys to make a move so they can hook up. The ones who do hook up walk to the back rooms and don’t come out. Some poor dude’s out cold on the couch and his friends are writing ASSWIPE across his forehead in permanent marker. The news is on TV. I’m transfixed by pictures of flames tearing through some town. I wish I could hear what the anchorwoman was saying. There’s only the crappy closed captioning, which says something about poasssble asson, which I think means “possible arson.” On the scene, mustachioed guys in mirrored sunglasses and baseball caps stand around taking notes. Somebody switches the channel to wrestling.
I push through the scree
n door and walk out into the yard, where it’s mostly quiet. You can see stars here. A smiling yard gnome like the one from Dad’s photos keeps watch over a rock garden. This one’s about three feet tall, with white hair and beard, red cheeks, a Viking helmet, brown pants, and a chain-mail tunic.
I have no idea where I am or how the hell I’m going to get back to the motel. It’s a good thing Gonzo’s a heavy-duty sleeper, because if he woke up and found himself alone, he’d have a full-blown panic attack. I step back, accidentally toppling the yard gnome.
“Sorry, little guy,” I say, righting him.
“I’d prefer that you not refer to me as ‘little guy.’”
That pot must have been better than I thought, because I could swear the yard gnome just said something. “Excuse me? Did you just t—”
“It’s derogatory. I don’t refer to you as skinny guy, now, do I?”
Holy shit. I’m talking to a yard gnome.
Somebody barrels down the street too fast, taking off the side mirror on a sedan. I look around but there’s no one I can turn to for verification.
“Did you see that? He didn’t even stop,” the yard gnome says without losing his cheery smile. “This neighborhood is going to hell.”
“Who … who are you?” I croak.
“My captor—the man who stole me from a fraternity house—calls me Grumpy. Of course, he’s also the sort of educated gentleman who pisses on me when he comes home drunk, so there you are.”
“Okay. Not loving the name Grumpy. What do you want to be called, then?” I ask.
“Ah, a question of identity, ágætr. Who would you be if you didn’t know who you are? How do you put a name to your soul, your essential sjálfr?”
“Don’t look at me. My parents named me Cameron after some actor they liked.”
“Exactly. You’ve been assigned an identity since birth. Then you spend the rest of your life walking around in it to see if it really fits. You try on all these different selves and abandon just as many. But really, it’s about dismantling all that false armor, getting down to what’s real.”