Soon, the three of them feeding off one another, they started getting called to the principal’s office together. “You said what?! This is a Christian school!”
Spencer watched Anthony work on it though. Spencer was amazed; Anthony had an uncanny ability to adapt to his surroundings. He seemed keenly aware of his environment and always knew exactly how to fit in, while Spencer didn’t care and Alek didn’t seem to either.
So Anthony, once he understood that cussing didn’t fly here—and that people snitched—got his temper in check. He prided himself on always, always knowing how to act; it just took him some extra time at the school to find out what wouldn’t go over. He started reining it in. Spencer watched Anthony become the prodigal son. The adults there, like adults everywhere, started to adore him. Adults always adored him. Or they found him quiet and polite, which Spencer was wise to. That was an act. That’s what Anthony wanted them to think, but Spencer knew that in reality, Anthony was like him.
When Spencer brought him home to meet his mom, Joyce found Anthony sweet but quiet; she couldn’t get a read on him. When she woke up to an angry call from a neighbor whose house had been covered in toilet paper by two boys who, in the halo from the street lamp, looked to be a chubby pasty white kid and a tall skinny black kid, Joyce was mortified. Not only had her son shamed himself to the neighbors, but what would she tell Mr. Sadler?
Spencer and Alek had been the only two people for years who didn’t buy into the system, but Anthony had that same independent streak Spencer and Alek had, the same eye for mischief. It wasn’t just that the school days had been so monotonous for so long; the school had its tentacles in other parts of their life. Aside from paintball and airsoft gun battles, Spencer and Alek hadn’t really had lives outside of the school. Now they did.
If Anthony provided a breath of fresh air—a kid who wasn’t a drone like all the others seemed to be, a freethinker like Spencer and Alek, a kid with style, and a window into culture Spencer and Alek had no other exposure too—he was obviously just as bowled over by them. The first time he went over to Spencer’s house and saw all the guns—toy guns, airsoft guns, paintball guns, an actual shotgun in Spencer’s bedroom—his jaw dropped.
“Your parents let you have this?”
Spencer shrugged. “You’ve never seen one of these?”
“Nah, not a for-real one.”
“You’ve never been hunting?
“No, I mean . . . black people don’t really hunt. It’s not like a thing we do in our leisure time.”
Anthony had never seen anything like it. Spencer began to understand that in this way too Anthony’s life had been a little different from his, that Anthony’s family had real exposure to tragic gangland violence. Anthony’s father was a delivery driver who became a pastor, a pastor who became a fixture in the community. He was the kind of man who counted the mayor and chief of police as personal friends, along with whatever celebrities Sacramento could claim, because whatever your politics were and whatever your religion was, you respected a man who went out to talk to gang members and put his body in front of violence. Pastor Sadler tried to build relationships with the people at the fringes of society, connecting his own flock with the dope peddlers and gangbangers. He tried to pull the police into it, build up relationships between police and those inclined to violence in depressed parts of the city, so that the two groups wouldn’t only see each other when people started shooting, and so that people shooting might be avoided in the first place. Even before he was ordained, Anthony’s dad had seen guns ruin far too many lives far too close to him to let his children have them as toys.
In this he mostly succeeded, keeping his children from having any exposure to guns, even while they lived in a community riddled with them. It was only when Anthony went from a public school in a rough neighborhood to the small private school in a safe one that he finally was exposed to guns.
At Spencer’s house, Anthony was out of Pastor Sadler’s reach, and he was blown away. He saved up $30 immediately to get his own airsoft gun, upgraded to an MP5, then an airsoft shotgun, and he got lost in the epic battles Alek and Spencer staged in front of their houses and down in the woods behind Schweitzer. Whole Saturdays disappeared while the three of them charged through the woods, then left and charged up Woodknoll Way toward an awaiting army. They recreated epic battles from the movies. At school the only class the three of them found at all interesting—the one subject they couldn’t even pretend not to care about—was history, because their teacher talked all the time about the world wars, and then the boys went out after class and on weekends to relive the great heroic battles: the landings at Normandy, the bombardment at Khe Sanh.
It helped that their history teacher seemed the most . . . well, normal. He was animated, and he fueled the boys’ interest in wars and the sporadic acts of heroism throughout history. They studied FDR; the idea of a person like that, leading a country through its greatest challenge while he himself was in physical pain, it was energizing. The teacher went into more depth about the wars than any other teacher had: World War II, Vietnam, and especially this one man, FDR, who’d handled a frenetic world and despite it had done the right things at the right times to defuse dangerous situations at critical moments. In class the boys held on to every word.
They’d watch movies, Saving Private Ryan, Letters from Iwo Jima, the fascists in the movies feeling a little familiar, Black Hawk Down, Glory, Apocalypse Now, and by the time the credits rolled, they’d swung onto their elbows and were talking over each other, “What I’d do when I got to the beach is hide behind the boat until they were reloading.” History wasn’t boring, not if you pulled open the curtains just enough so you could imagine yourself on stage. Playing the part of an infantryman charging the shoreline or a pilot buzzing the treetops to skirt enemy radar. They dreamed up scenarios in which they defeated a threat against all odds and saved the day; it got their pulses beating, and then they went out and shot each other with pellets, imagining what would happen if one day, it was one of them in the line of fire.
6.
“I WANNA GO TO THE PROM,” Anthony said.
Spencer laughed. “You mean like with me?”
“No, man! I mean just in general, we don’t have it here. That’s my point, there’s no prom here, or homecoming, no—I don’t know. No public school stuff.” Anthony was already preparing to leave. He had a better chance to make something of himself in sports at a public school, and find a girlfriend too. Spencer couldn’t argue. You weren’t even supposed to talk to girls here. If he’d had a chance to escape, he would have taken it too.
So Anthony moved on, but the bond between them was set. They stayed in touch, Anthony still came over to play with guns and watch World War II movies. But school wasn’t the same without him there. He’d brought something new and exciting to their lives, and now that he was gone this place was even harder to tolerate.
A new school year started. Again, it was a community of two. Spencer and Alek, a bunch of people they didn’t understand, a bunch of people who didn’t understand them.
It was then, that first year after Anthony left, that the school finally went too far.
To Spencer, it was clear. Alek was singled out; he was quiet and didn’t complain, but like Spencer, everyone knew Alek didn’t buy in to the whole code. The ritualistic trips to the principal’s office were no longer enough; pressure mounted. A teacher nosing around the students’ backpacks took out Alek’s iPod, scrolled through the songs, and found one with a bad word. Another claimed to have overheard Alek talking about an argument with a classmate, and that was enough. Alek was labeled a problem child.
He was only in eighth grade, but Spencer watched him patted down every day before school like he was some kind of ex-con, and they went a step further. The school believed he needed to live with his father, and presented the new arrangement as a fait accompli to Heidi. She felt blindsided. It was dizzying; it didn’t make sense, the very school that had asked her ag
ain and again to help them, to coach soccer, volunteer in the lunchroom, volunteer in the nursery, suddenly deciding someone else’s home would be better for her child. She’d hardly had the chance to make sense of the absurd idea that Alek—Alek!—was being called a problem child, or the chance to speak her mind, before he was gone, first to his father’s house just across town, then even farther.
Spencer thought the whole thing was bullshit. He hated the place even more for separating him from his best friend. The notion that Alek, of all people, was some kind of threat was so ridiculous it was almost funny. Spencer worried about him, although when he went to visit Alek at his dad’s house, Alek seemed to be doing just fine.
“Wow,” Spencer said, running a hand over a speaker box, part of an elaborate intercom system Alek’s father had installed. “You’re pretty spoiled now.”
“Dude, I’m not spoiled.” Just then, the intercom crackled to life and a woman’s voice came over it. “Alek? Honey? Would you like chocolate sauce on your brownie?”
Spencer looked at Alek. “Okay,” Alek said, “maybe like a little spoiled.”
JOYCE WATCHED WHAT Heidi was going through with sadness. Spencer didn’t think his friend was deserving of so much attention, but was happy his mother was finally getting her blood pressure up about the school. Now Spencer had a powerful ally, and it wasn’t a moment too soon. Alek said his dad was going to let him go to the Del Campo school, the bigger, more normal public school, which was good for Alek, but it meant Spencer was going to be stuck here, all alone.
The truth was, Joyce by then didn’t need much convincing. As much as she wanted to believe the private school was a good thing for the kids, the school community had started to rub her the wrong way. They’d have Sunday fellowship meetings, which already she didn’t love because after church she liked a little time to just be with her children, but fine, she went, and hosted parties when it was her turn to host parties in the spirit of open-mindedness, or fellowship, or whatever. But the people were just—she just couldn’t connect with them. They didn’t mingle; they kept to themselves. They didn’t seem capable of relating to anyone who wasn’t part of their church. They treated anyone else with scrutiny, even mistrust, and when the school intervened in Heidi’s life, as far as Joyce was concerned, that was it. She made up her mind.
“Spencer, hon, I need to talk to you.”
“Okay . . .”
She came into Spencer’s room with a serious look on her face and shut the door; Spencer worried that some tragedy had befallen the family. “So, listen.” She sat on the bed, and considered him. “Do you want to switch schools?” He couldn’t believe it. Was this a joke? Was she actually going to let him leave? The clouds parted, the future brightened; he wouldn’t be left behind, all alone, while Anthony and Alek moved on to exciting new lives. Now there was just the matter of reentry into the wild, finding excuses to leave school early so they could sneak over to Del Campo for football tryouts.
Spencer and Alek had won a huge victory. The battle felt no less than existential. To an adolescent boy few things could be more devastating than the prospect of missing out on high school life. Sports, girls, parties, dances—their confinement to the tiny school was stunting an impulse that was no less than biological. Even their hormones were telling them they had to get out.
Both had been given an important two-year lesson by Anthony, who’d descended on their lives like an oracle of cool, reminding them what they were missing out on. Prom, homecoming, football, the high calling of high school jockdom. Spencer was excited for public school; for Alek it was mostly just the escape that seemed to appeal. The school had beaten him down. He didn’t really care where he went afterward.
Together, they arrived at Del Campo like two orphans fleeing, with little besides Anthony’s advice to tell them how to behave or what kind of clothes were okay to wear. They found a bench no one sat on, and the two of them, Spencer smiley but overweight, Alek quiet and brooding, both profoundly uncool, both happy but uncomfortable in their new surroundings, sat and ate their lunch, just the two of them, like a couple of old-timers at a neighborhood park.
They watched the other kids mingle, kids who’d established their cliques and clubs and groups and study partners, but Spencer and Alek ate their wax paper–wrapped sandwiches with just each other. Spencer didn’t know precisely how to engage with normal kids, but he had a feeling that sitting just with Alek wasn’t healthy. They both needed new friends. As hard as it would be to try and mingle, as much as he stood to be ridiculed, he had to branch out. So one day at lunch he decided, Let’s go. It’s now or never. He got up, and looked down at Alek. “You coming?”
Alek shook his head. So Spencer ran the gauntlet alone. Alone, to bounce around from group to group until he found a place where he could fit, for a while, and Alek remained, content, still on that bench, keeping to himself, watching teenage life pass him by while Spencer tried to mingle without a wingman. They’d both wanted to be here, but now that they had what they wanted, this was when their separation began. Spencer couldn’t help but feel he was, in a way, leaving Alek behind.
He just didn’t know how permanent it was going to be.
Still, as hard as Spencer tried to blend in, there were a few people who made it impossible. He himself for one; he still never knew what to wear. The small Christian school had stunted his fashion sense and he always felt off. He stuck out in the crowd. Alek didn’t know anything about fashion either, but didn’t seem to care that they were always dressed noticeably different from the kids who’d gone to normal schools. And at football practice, one of the coaches liked to pair Spencer and Alek for the “heads” drill, lining them up, fingers down, and then, lest anyone forget the two had come from the small Christian school, he’d yell, “Watch out, it’s a holy war!” as Spencer and Alek charged each other.
And then one day Alek was gone. Off to Oregon with his dad. Spencer had to keep it a secret; Heidi didn’t even know until she called Alek one day to find out if he wanted to come over for dinner, and Alek said he couldn’t because he was in Oregon. Just like that. And though it felt cruel and sudden to have his friend gone so quickly, and Spencer missed him, he thought, Oregon, yeah. It’s probably better for him out there. Something about nature, open fields. He wasn’t exactly sure why, but that’s how Spencer pictured Oregon, and that’s what he pictured his best friend needing.
7.
AS SPENCER WALKED UP to the dais to receive his high school diploma he heard what sounded like a boo.
Could it be a boo?
It couldn’t be a boo, could it?
What, the—why are they . . .?
It was. It was three people, maybe five. A jokester, a friend, he later found out, thought it’d be funny to get a few people to boo when Spencer went up to get his diploma. But the people nearby must have assumed there was a good reason, so it caught on, and soon the whole damn crowd was booing. Spencer walked across the stage squeezing his fists together, seething inside, ready to explode with anger. His whole family was out there, watching him get booed. He wanted to give everyone the finger, to scream obscenities at the crowd, but he repressed it. He took his diploma and walked off the stage, eager to close this chapter of his life for good. It was a fitting send-off for a postgraduate life that would be thoroughly undistinguished.
Spencer finished high school and started waffling. He took a job at Jamba Juice. He gained weight. He did little for exercise besides the occasional jujitsu class. His brother, Everett, had taken up the sport, and Everett was the one with the car, so Spencer followed him to whatever diversion Everett was willing to drive to. Spencer had always liked martial arts, because Spencer liked martial anything, but he’d grown frustrated with karate. He’d come home from a class and try to practice on Alek’s little brother, but when his sparring partner didn’t position himself according to the rigid rules of the form, Spencer couldn’t show off his moves. He wanted to do moves on everyone, but it just didn’t seem to work ag
ainst someone who didn’t know karate.
Jujitsu was different. Jujitsu wasn’t like the other martial arts. Jujitsu worked on anyone. It worked if they knew jujitsu, and it worked if they didn’t know jujitsu. Especially if they didn’t know jujitsu.
That also made it practical. Not just because you could choke out your best friend’s little brother no matter what form of resistance he tried to put up. You could subdue any person on the street who tried to attack you, or hurt someone else. As long as he didn’t know jujitsu better than you, you could beat anyone.
At $8 an hour serving smoothies, he couldn’t afford to train, so he walked into new gyms, signed up for free trial memberships, took their classes, then apologized, “You know, actually this location isn’t that convenient for me,” and went to find another free trial.
A dozen different fighting styles from a dozen different teachers.
He couldn’t make any kind of progress, but he liked the camaraderie, and this rare combination of confidence and humility you got from it, even though those two things felt like opposites. Any skinny old man walking down the street could choke you out if he was better trained than you, and that made you respect everyone. But if you were the better-trained one, you could submit anyone, regardless of what advantages they might have over you. At least, he figured, unless they had some kind of weapon.
But mostly he spent those days hanging with Anthony, who’d started college, or texting with Alek. And he spent time around Meghan, the kind-faced girl with piercings and sleeve tattoos who worked next to him at Jamba Juice. She’d just come up from the Bay Area. Spencer helped her move and more than that; without totally realizing it at the time, he provided her a soft buffer to help ease her into a new phase in her life. She wound up doing the same for him.
The 15:17 to Paris Page 4