by John Goode
I am sure it was an innocent gesture. I’m sure he probably meant to just make me look up at him so at the very least he could see my lips move. Maybe he was trying to reassure me by placing a hand on my shoulder. I’m sure there were half a million reasons he could have made a move like that, but my mind only knew one.
I drew back and flinched. Not the flinch of someone who was scared or concerned. Not the flinch of someone who was nervous and caught by surprise. And certainly not the flinch of someone who was supposed to be having a heated discussion with the guy he had been making out with mere hours before.
It was the flinch of someone who was used to being hit.
He froze instantly. His entire body looked carved out of wax as his expression morphed from anger to horrified shock, while mine dropped into a panicked cringe of abject terror. The second I did it, I regretted it. I cursed as I took a few stumbling steps away from him as I tried to compose myself internally.
“Kyle,” he said in a voice barely above a whisper. “I wasn’t going to—”
“I know,” I said abruptly, his concern stinging worse than the panic. “I know,” I repeated more softly as I felt my eyes begin to sting. I was embarrassed, angry at myself, but most of all, I was tired. I was so tired of feeling like this. I was tired of being afraid of everything. My legs gave out under me as I wilted to the floor, more a move of surrender than an actual fall.
He raced toward me like a fairy-tale prince. His arms encircled me as I tried to draw away weakly. Brad’s sympathy was worse than his anger, and I cursed myself for being so fucking weak. He pulled me close as the dam holding my emotions broke, and they came flooding out in a sorrow-filled sob. I laid my head closer to his heart and began to explode with seventeen years of pain and wrath rushing out in a meltdown of nuclear proportions.
He ran his fingers through my hair as he tried to soothe me. We rocked there for several minutes, my mind incapable of thought. I heard him say, his voice devoid of all emotion again, “I know, I know.” Then, after a few seconds, sorrow began to saturate his words. “My dad hits me too.”
And then we began to cry together.
IT must have been more than twenty minutes before we regained enough composure to make it off the living room floor and to my bed. Though he was physically larger than I was, he clutched me like a drowning man clutches an overturned lifeboat. There was something about him hurting that made me forget about my own pain instantly. Maybe it was because, in my mind, he was some kind of high school superhero, and the thought of a lion that cute with a thorn in his paw was just too much for me to handle. Maybe it was because deep down I thought he was just a better person than I was, which meant his agony was far more valid than mine. Maybe it was because it was easier to focus on someone else’s pain than my own.
Maybe it was because when he hurt, I felt an ache in my own chest.
“I sounded like him,” he said in a voice so withdrawn that it was like nails on a chalkboard. “I sounded just like my dad when he yells at my mom.” A silent, half-swallowed sob racked his whole body, and I felt it reverberate through my own, a sympathetic pain that resonated from having been treated the same all my life. It was as if, for that moment, we were one person in pain, each of us sharing the other’s pain somehow. I squeezed him tight in commiseration, reassuring my imagination he was a real person and not a madness-induced hallucination.
“It’s okay,” I said, sounding as lame as another human being ever has.
He looked up at me, his eyes red, watery orbs of anguish. “No it’s not.” His fists gripped at my shirt. “I don’t want to be him, Kyle; I never want to be him.” His head sank onto my chest, and the rest of his words trailed off as he began to cry again
I knew that feeling well.
If I had had a choice between being caught by a band of roving cannibals who were competing in a sadistic new reality show where I was the main course or growing up to be my mother, I would have started to marinate myself to help ease the cooking process along. I remember seeing the echoes of what Brad might become when I saw his dad drunk in the foyer, his bloodshot eyes scouring me up and down, judging me and my entire life in one intoxicated stare. I could see how Brad might end up like that man one day, bitter, angry, his best days behind him, a life of popularity and high school fame long dead, mired in a life he wouldn’t wish on another soul. Silently screaming for a pardon from the purgatory of his own creation, if even for one, memory-blurred night.
“You’re not like him at all,” I lied, knowing what he needed to hear. I knew it because I had wanted someone to say it to me most of my life—a proclamation that I was more than the sum of my genetic heritage. That I was not condemned to a life sentence of looking into the mirror and seeing someone else staring out at me.
“Some days I hate him so much,” he said, nuzzling me, our legs intertwining as if just holding each other was not close enough. “I hear him downstairs, and I just feel this rage inside of me… and I want to just—”
I felt his body tense next to mine, and again, I knew how he felt, and unlike him, I had words for it. “You just want to run out of your room and start swinging until they shut up,” I said, envisioning the well-worn fantasy in my head. “You want to just start hitting them again and again. And you don’t want them to pass out, because if they pass out, they can’t feel it anymore. And if they can’t feel just a little bit of the pain they’ve caused you, then what’s the point?”
I felt tears roll down my face as I stared up at the ceiling, blinking the images away. I saw him move toward me, his eyes reflecting the abject shock he was feeling. “Is that how you feel?” he asked.
I felt my face grow warm as I nodded.
“Oh, Kyle,” he said, and he pulled me into his embrace. “I never want to hurt you,” he said as I felt the fresh wounds on my heart begin to bleed. “I promise you I will never hurt you.”
And he meant it, I’m sure he meant it.
“I didn’t mean what I said before,” he said as his arms tried to protect me from the world around us. “I didn’t mean ‘What were you thinking approaching the Table ’cause you don’t deserve to be there.’ I mean, what were you thinking doing that when Kelly was there?”
I felt my mind pause as the idea I had been completely wrong about him tried to work itself out.
“He’s a complete dick. He lives for doing shit like that. I thought everyone knew about him, and that’s why no one ever tries to sit with us.”
I mentally berated myself as all of the things I had thought in anger about him came echoing back in my mind. Every time I thought I had him figured out he threw me a curve ball, and I ended up scrambling for cover.
“I want you to come sit with us tomorrow,” he said, pulling me back so we could see each other.
“No,” I said, shaking my head quickly. “I was just going to ask you something,” I said, physically trying to pull away from him.
His hands kept me pinned as he said in a calm voice, “I’m serious, I want you to sit with us and see we aren’t the stuck-up fuckers everyone thinks we are.”
I still hadn’t stopped shaking my head no.
“Kyle, I’m serious.” His voice dropped an octave, sending a chill down my spine. “Please sit with me tomorrow at lunch.”
My head stopped moving.
“Seriously?” I asked.
Instead of answering, he kissed me. It was so much better than any yes could have been.
THE next morning I was a wreck.
I had a very specific pattern to the way I dressed. I called it social camouflage. Since we didn’t have a lot of money, I couldn’t afford a bunch of name-brand stuff anyway, so I did most of my shopping at places most kids my age wouldn’t admit to knowing existed. Nothing had bright colors, nothing other than a T-shirt and jeans, nothing that could ever be picked out of a lineup with a dozen other invisible kids standing next to me. So far it had worked, even though there were days I hated being that person. I wanted to be more tha
n just invisible, more than just playing it safe. I wanted to be the snappy dresser or the stylish guy who always wore clothes that looked like they were made just for him. People like Brad made things like a letterman jacket and a white T-shirt look like they were part of a movie wardrobe, and they drove me crazy.
My first instinct was to dress down even more than normal. I mean, I was testing the limits of my ability to be ignored sitting at that table, and I had no idea how to proceed. Should I try to increase my blandness when everyone was going to stare at me anyway, or should I use the moment to break out of my role and show that maybe I was more than the high school ninja I had been up to that point?
Or maybe I would just throw up all over myself and call in sick.
I got to school and didn’t see Brad anywhere. I was hoping maybe we could go over our lines for lunch, since we really didn’t get past me asking “Seriously?” before making out for the rest of the night. During my first few periods I went over some topics I could bring up in case conversation seemed to be lagging. After all, I at least wanted to seem interesting to these people. The period before lunch, the desire to puke returned, and I spent half the time in the bathroom, splashing cold water on my face and trying not to pass out.
When I went to my locker to ditch my books for lunch, I saw the small note that had been slid through the grille lying on the bottom. I unfolded it and saw Brad’s writing. “Meet you at the Table,” it said. I had never been happier in my entire life.
I walked out of the hallway and into the quad. The sun seemed brighter, and the air smelled sweeter. I am pretty sure there were no cartoon birds circling my head as I made my way across the quad, but I saw them all the same.
I saw him across the way sitting on the Table. There was a pocket of space around him and his friends, as if there were an invisible velvet rope warding the common people away. I could see Kelly standing there, looking more like a guard dog than a bouncer, and I wondered why I had never noticed him before. Brad looked up and saw me; he smiled and waved me over. It was like finding a golden ticket in your candy bar.
I tensed as I walked past Kelly; he seemed to ignore me, but I could see him give me a sideways glance. It was part “Hulk smash!” and part “They really will let anyone eat here nowadays.” I ignored him as I heard Brad call out, “Kyle, over here, man.”
“Hey,” I said, moving closer to him.
“You know everyone?” he asked, knowing I didn’t.
“This is Tony, Adrian, and that’s Cody,” he said, gesturing to the three insanely good-looking guys sitting at the Table and staring at me like I was an alien life form.
“That’s Susie, Deanna…,” he said, gesturing to the two cheerleaders sitting to the side.
“And this is Jennifer,” he said, smiling at the beautiful blonde girl sitting next to him.
“My girlfriend,” he finished as the blood drained from my face.
“Pleased to meet you,” I said automatically, my face a mask of congeniality.
I ALWAYS hated fairy tales.
I mean, one, the name is completely demeaning as well as misleading. Precious few of them have actual fairies in them, so I never understood why they were called that in the first place. Two, most of them feature incorrectly named happy endings for all involved. That sucks, because from the very beginning, the reader is encouraged to believe that things will work out for the better in the end. Anyone who knows anything knows that almost nothing ever ends, and when it does, it rarely ever does so well. And the third and most important reason was that I hated watching useless people waiting around to be saved.
I mean, honestly, who just sits around in a house with a bunch of short guys waiting for their prince to come? So your mom is a bitch and wants to kill you because her mirror told her to. Cry me a river, why don’t you? Your big plan is sitting around, cleaning house, waiting for the other shoe to drop?
And speaking of shoes, everyone has been picked on by mean girls. You do not wait for some old lady to pop in and transmogrify some innocent rodents just so you can sneak into a dance under false pretenses. And let’s say you do sneak in. For the love of all that is holy, take your mask off and look the guy in the face and say, “Hi, I’m Cindy from down the street. I have this thing at midnight; can we do coffee later?” This nonsense about a shoe and searching the entire village for one girl—it’s crap.
And if it wasn’t crap, I didn’t want to know, because I knew if I left a glass sneaker behind after some dance, no one would have spent five seconds looking for me afterward. I didn’t want to be a victim, some princess locked away in a tower, waiting to be saved. I wanted to be the hero of my story; I didn’t need to be saved. At least I didn’t want to be.
After a while, there is a trick you learn when dealing with unpredictable drunks. When someone is drunk, everything about that person becomes amplified in one way or another. Angry people get furious, sad people become miserable, and my mom becomes downright paranoid. I see TV programs that portray drunken people as incoherent, stumbling fools who slur their speech and have no idea what’s going on around them. It makes me angry, because my mother is never like that when she’s wasted. She becomes hyperaware of the people around her and reads more into their facial expressions than should have been humanly possible. I learned quickly to suppress any and all emotions just in case one might pass through my brain and show as an expression on my face at the wrong moment.
When Jennifer reached out to shake my hand, my face held all the expression of a wax figure.
“So you’re Brad’s tutor?” she asked in a voice that was bubblier than that of any girl I had met before.
“History whore,” I said with a completely straight face. I heard Brad choke on something as he tried to intervene.
“Excuse me?” she asked, her head cocking exactly like a curious cocker spaniel’s.
“Okay, you're excused,” I said, still not missing a beat.
“Can I talk to you for a second?” Brad asked, his face red with emotion.
“It was great meeting you,” I said in a tone that would have held up in a court of law as genuine and pleasant.
“Same,” she said slowly, obviously not sure of what just happened.
Brad grabbed me by my elbow and dragged me away from the quad and out of earshot. “What the fuck are you doing?”
My face would have been more expressive if it had been crafted from diamond. I refused to break down in front of Brad over what had just happened. I was not going to pick up my dress hem and flee into the night. “You have to be kidding me,” I said in a tone barely capable of reaching his ears.
“You had to know about Jennifer,” he said, making it sound like I was trying to argue that the world was flat despite the globe standing between us. “Everyone knows we’re going out.”
Truth was, he was right. Everyone did know that Brad and Jennifer were a couple. They were the high school equivalent of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Everyone knew but me. You see, high school reputation and gossip were dependent on word of mouth. And word of mouth involved people talking to other people. No one talked to me. The fact that Brad had already found his princess and I might just be the comedic sidekick—or possibly the talking animal—was starting to dawn on me.
“I didn’t. If I did, I wouldn’t have done anything with you,” I almost hissed through gritted teeth.
And now he cocked his head to the side like a baffled golden retriever.
“Why would you think I would fool around with you?” I demanded, realizing that we might have been existing in completely different stories the entire time.
“Because we like each other,” he answered automatically like it was the most obvious answer to a question on some odd test.
I refused to cover my face with a kerchief and flee across the quad. “Enjoy your lunch,” I said in a tone that, on its best day, would have been referred to as “frosty.” I turned deliberately and smiled at Jennifer and the rest of the people whose names I had already
forgotten. “Was awesome meeting you,” I called to her with a half wave.
As soon as I rounded the corner of the music building, I threw my lunch in the trash and took off like a bullet.
This was what I meant when I said things that ended rarely ended well.
I’m not sure how high school kids survived before campuses became open at lunch, but I imagine it must have been a lot like living on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. The freedom to just leave campus, even if only for a few minutes, was invaluable.
The area around Foster High was considered remote at best. It was built on the outskirts of the town proper, and our student population was an odd mix of the town’s wealthiest and poorest kids. The school district straddled the old projects where we lived and a strip of new housing developments where Brad’s house was. In a way, the school was considered to be a no man’s land.
Behind the baseball diamonds and soccer field stood a fence that marked the end of school property and the beginning of the woods.
Now, calling the sparse collection of trees that lined the property “the woods” was ironic at best and sarcastic at worst. No one who had ever been in actual woods would have referred to the motley grouping as anything else but what it was: the back of the school grounds. But for us, it was our place.
Or, more correctly, since I was a student here in name only, it was better called Their Place.
It was a place where the stoners went to light up between classes, where the older kids sneaked a cigarette at lunch, and where couples went to make out whenever they wanted. The dense overhang effectively cut the light to almost nothing, making it virtually impossible to see what was happening inside without actually going in. I had never been out there before, but unlike Brad’s relationship with Jennifer, I knew it existed.
How did I miss them going out? I spent more lunches stalking that table than anyone else did, but somehow I missed he had a girlfriend? Maybe I didn’t miss it; maybe I just ignored it because I wanted it not to be true. I could feel the same heated shame creep up my face again at the thought of what a fucking fool I must have looked like, thinking that Brad could ever have been mine. He was one of the most popular people in my world; how could I have ever thought he would pick me?