Good Kids

by Benjamin Nugent

  “It would be safer if I came with you,” I said. “You can throw it, and I can be lookout.”

  She weighed the stone in her hand. “Good plan,” she said.

  • • •

  Six-thirty the next evening, we met again at Classé Café. We shared a single cup of coffee and a single monster cookie (M&M’s, chocolate chips, larger than the plate on which it was served). I wanted our fingers to touch as we ate it down to the center, but Khadijah left me the core. She withdrew the stone, with its black insignia, from her bag, placed it on the table, and made a “let’s go” gesture with her eyes, a dart to the side.

  We were both in loose clothing, for freedom of movement. She wore a Smith College sweatshirt and I wore a sweatshirt with a flaming yin-and-yang sign. The important difference was in our shorts: Hers were khakis, from JCPenney or L.L.Bean. Mine were from the Army-Navy store by the Dead Mall, and had elaborate pockets.

  “I bet your mom went to Smith, right?” I said.

  “Yeah, why?”

  I shook my head to show it was nothing. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Absolutely.” She crossed her arms over the sweatshirt as we left the café and walked down the sidewalk toward the bank.

  “Let me carry the stone,” I whispered. “I have deeper pockets. It’ll be hidden, but with easy access.” I held open the flap of a cargo pocket, revealing an abyss.

  She looked doubtful but finally shrugged. “I guess that’s useful.” She took the flap of my pocket between her fingers and dropped in the stone.

  We crossed downtown to the common and sat on the cold grass waiting for the sky to go black. Across the street, a spray of birds dispersed over Bank of Boston. The bank was an old brick house, unobtrusively converted. High, arched windows offered honey-light views of an empty marble room, a stable of fuzzy-walled cubicles. It was pristine, untouched by the passage of goods, clean because it was touched only by money. It was, I had to admit, asking to be smashed.

  “Fuck it,” said Khadijah. She stood.

  It was a shade too early in the dusk to be throwing things. A shade too bright. Black birds stood sharp against the graying blue.

  “Give me the stone,” she said. She stared at me as if the hesitation on my face was a symptom of an interesting pathology.

  I could feel the onrush of danger as a physical ache now. But I knew I couldn’t hold off Khadijah forever. I took the stone as slowly as I could from my cargo pocket and placed it on her palm. Her fingers closed.

  “I’m sure for an anarchist from New York,” she said, “this shit would just be nothing.” She crossed the street, walking toward the bank.

  I shadowed her. I swiveled my head to the left and right, and didn’t see anyone coming from either direction. She stood with her nose close to the glass, like a child before an animatronic window display at Yankee Candle. She cranked back her arm.

  At this moment I came to terms with what was happening, and grunted for her to stop. But it was too late. The stone jumped from her hand and hit the window hard at close range. It fell to the sidewalk and rolled. The glass was uncracked.

  A suggestion of motion in the bushes solidified into shapes: more birds, rising from within the leaves. Khadijah bent to chase the stone, but it bumped the toe of my boot and I picked it up.

  “You can’t throw it again,” I said. “We have to leave.” I ran, the stone clutched in my right hand, and after a moment’s hesitation she followed.

  “An alarm thing must be going off somewhere,” I panted as the dusk blurred around us. “Let’s go to the Thing in the Woods.”

  As the dark became absolute, we tore through the common, the cobblestones of Market Square, the Wattsbury College football field, the soccer field of Wattsbury High, to the clearing where the groundskeeper’s wheel stood in its ring of mashed filters. We sat for a moment side by side on the wheel. Ten seconds passed. In unison, strangers to exercise, we slid off, exhausted, and lay flat on the grass.

  Then, the revolution: She climbed on top of me.

  “Thank you for not letting me throw it again,” she said.

  Her breath was dark, warm on my neck. I could smell the murk of her sweat through her sweatshirt and on her wrist, which she pressed against my forehead. She took a fist of my terrible, diseased-looking hair in her hand. She hooked her other hand into mine and spoke toward the grass.

  “I like being constantly checked out by you,” she said.

  “I know I’m gross,” I said quickly. “I understand if you don’t want to hook up with me.”

  “The only gross thing about you is you think you’re gross.”

  I laughed at this kindness.

  “I’m being serious,” she said. “Look at my face.”

  “How do you feel about me?” I asked, looking at the sky. I didn’t stop to wonder whether she would be honest; the question was a prayer for a clue to my life. “Do you like me?”

  She pressed a finger to her mouth and stared at me hard. “With you and me, there are no pig questions.” She reestablished her grip on my hand and lowered her face toward mine. Our eyes were as close as they’d been under the table in Gaia. She was right, I was not the person I had thought I was. I knew, suddenly, that I was someone else, with more elements. It surprised me that the touching of hands could do that: reveal to you a new piece of who you were. I dropped the stone in the grass and placed my free palm on her cheek.

  That’s when the cops showed. Flashlight beams crossed over the rusted wheel like spotlights over Hollywood, and patrolmen rode bicycles out of the darkness. Khadijah rolled off me and sat upright. She waved to the two men.

  “Here,” she said, and held out the stone.

  They did not go hard on us. They walked us and their bicycles down the street, to the new station on North Pleasant, a postmodern, turreted castle of brick and limestone. The Bank of Boston branch president, Brian Stapleton, was waiting in the lobby. He wiped his wire-rim spectacles against the belt of his trench coat. They sat us before him in a second-story conference room and told us they were letting him make the call regarding consequences.

  Once we were settled, Brian Stapleton squinted at us. “That Khadijah? Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn?” he asked the officers. They nodded. “My son Scotty still talks about the platypus this girl made for Darwin Day, in sixth grade at the Common School.”

  He turned to Khadijah, abashed. “Did you really throw a stone at the window?” He cleaned his glasses again, as if to dispel an optical illusion. “Or was it this gentleman?” He pointed in my direction. There might have been comfort, for Brian, in my troubled hair, my flaming yin-yang.

  “It was me,” said Khadijah. “He was just along for the ride.”

  “I carried the stone,” I said. I intended to tell the story, but Brian Stapleton only wanted to know my parents’ names. He asked Khadijah for her phone number. After he dialed on the conference room phone, he handed her the receiver.

  Khadijah told Nancy what we’d done, but anarchism was never mentioned. “Why, Mom?” she said, toward the end of the conversation. “You’re asking why I did it? That’s a socioeconomic question, Mom. Yes, it is the reason I don’t eat meat anymore.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Nancy walked in. She pulled a gray shawl tight around her shoulders and placed one hand on the table, to steady herself as she confronted her daughter. Khadijah’s father was nowhere in sight. This did not surprise me; Nancy had always struck me as a first-into-the-fray type. What surprised me was the entrance of my own father, close behind.

  “Who told you about this?” I demanded.

  “You little aristocrat.” He put his hands on his head. Nancy glared at Khadijah as he spoke, to extend the purview of his judgment to her daughter. “Do you realize,” he continued, “how bourgeois it is to force a hardworking man”—he pointed to Brian Stapleton, who did not react to this appellation one way or the other—“to come here at dinnertime to find out who threw a rock at his place of business? To make somebody e
lse pay for an expensive pane of glass?”

  Nancy paid rapt attention to this speech. “It was my child who was the ringleader, Linus. The ringleader of this petty rebellion.”

  Khadijah had remained quiet as my father spoke. Now she pushed back her chair and stood. I could see the spirit of a grown-up possess her; the look in her eyes was identical to Nancy’s, originally Nancy’s, presumably. This did not blunt its capacity as a weapon.

  “Petty rebellion?” snapped Khadijah. “Petty rebellion?”

  Nancy was calm. “Sit down,” she said.

  Khadijah ignored her. Looking at Nancy’s face—there was real fear just dawning in it now—I thought of Victor Frankenstein, Henry Higgins, blitzed by their own creations.

  “Speaking of petty rebellion,” said Khadijah, her eyes oscillating between Nancy and my father. She spoke very slowly now. “Gee, I wonder why you guys just happened to be hanging out when I called.” She looked at me pointedly before she turned back to the parents. “Speaking of petty rebellion,” she continued, “you two are obviously sleeping together.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Nancy. “We work at the same college. They called me out of the meeting and told me you were in the custody of the police.”

  “I found your time line,” said Khadijah.

  “I found your ring,” I blurted at my father. When I said ring I made quotation marks with my hands.

  Things went silent for what seemed like quite a long time. Brian tucked his head into his overcoat like a turtle, slapped his business card on the table, and left the room. “I’m fine,” he called behind him, as he turned in to the hallway, whisking his scarf from his chair. “You’ll get a call from our insurers. Thanks, everyone.” The bicycle patrolmen looked at each other and followed him out.

  Nancy and my father stood with their hands on their chins. It’s really happening, I thought. Dad’s intent was to use a cock ring on Khadijah’s mom.

  My father dropped into a chair. He let his head thump on the table, once, twice, three times. It was not the same as if Khadijah had presented his dick to my mother on a sword, but it was close.

  With my father publicly humiliated, my world—consisting at the moment of the conference room—was new. His beard was not a revolutionary beard anymore. The revolution now belonged to somebody else. Khadijah sat, her eyes demure, picking at her cuticles as she had the day in Gaia Foods. She had cracked things.

  So this was love. Here was our rite of spring.

  6.

  Almost More Like Poems

  Rachel raised her hand as soon as we were assembled at the kitchen table for the family meeting. “Divorce,” she said. My parents stared at her and I knew she was right.

  “An experiment,” my mother said.

  “That’s just about right, trying something new,” my father corrected. “An experiment in living separately.” He cleared his throat, switching to lighter news. “I’m moving to New York. On some weekends I’ll come here and stay at an apartment I’m going to rent, and on some you’ll come down on the train.”

  I thought, Good. Since Gaia Foods, it had been difficult to watch my parents speak to each other, so I was glad they’d live far apart. The euphoria that had accompanied the revelation that my father slept with Nancy was gone. What remained was the knowledge that for a long time—I didn’t know how long—my parents’ marriage had been a carcass walking upright. Now they were talking and listening with no expression on their faces, upright carcasses themselves.

  He still doesn’t know we saw him kissing Nancy in Gaia, I thought. He thinks he got away with it for a long time. I looked at Rachel and my mother. Did they know what I had seen in the police station last night? Did anyone know that Khadijah and I had been on the verge of a kiss?

  “Josh, your father and I have talked about what happened at the station,” my mother said, her voice drained of character. “We’d appreciate it if you’d not discuss it right now.” With her eyes, she indicated Rachel.

  Rachel came to understand that she was being left out of something secret and horrible. She began to cry. “What is she talking about?” she asked my father. “Why do you want to move to New York?”

  “I’m still going to see you every weekend, sweetie. But I’ve never been fully at home in the ecosystem of a political science professor. I wish I could give you a better explanation, because I love you so much, but please understand, I’m a different person than the one I’ve been acting like I am.” His voice went high. “I’m going to try to make some connections down there, my love. I want to find some people I can talk to about the kinds of essays I want to write, essays that are almost more like poems than essays. I’ll try to publish in some respected quarterlies, for starters. Since I’ll be consulting for nonprofits on a freelance basis, it’ll be easier to keep that work coming if I’m able to be in the belly of the beast, so to speak. So it’s practical, sweetie, try to see that. Your daddy wants to make you proud.”

  He sounded near tears himself. I didn’t understand what he was saying. I looked at the brown rug. My mother stared straight ahead, doll-faced. I felt sad for her, but I could also feel an unmistakable surge of revulsion, now that she’d been discarded by my father, and this surge in my stomach made me hate myself. The intensity of this new sensation—self-loathing—surprised me. I had seen my mother kick a potty at him across the room, heard her scream at him to leave the house. When these things happened, I knew they were technically bad. But I’d respected her. I’d been moved by her. Now that she was being Adult in the face of outrage, I wanted to run. It was like ten cups of English Breakfast, panic and inspiration all at once, a need to leap out of the skin.

  “Can we go now?” I asked.

  After my parents retreated to the study to compose an agreement on the sharing of resources, my little sister and I stayed on the sun-drenched first floor of the white Cape Cod. It was three-thirty on a Wednesday. We had too many empty hours in which to consider what had just happened, so we invented a game a fifteen-year-old and a twelve-year-old should not have been playing, called Googy. I was a retarded baby—Googy was my name—and Rachel was my mother. I ran to open the front door and escape into the woods by ramming my head against the door repeatedly, and she came up behind me and dragged me from the vestibule, shouting, “Googy, you’ll only make your brain even worse by doing that.” I gurgled and moaned, and rolled around on the floor, gripping my head in my hands—retardation and epilepsy were not yet rigorously differentiated for Rachel and me. I tried to learn to crawl and collapsed repeatedly, finally curling into a fetal position and pretending to puke on the floor.

  I lay for a while in a sunbeam, like a dog. I ignored my sister’s demands that I rise, until she went upstairs to her room and I looked out the window and saw ashes falling from the sky. My parents were in the study, writing their agreement, and would not have been able to see. I thought of telling them about the evidence of fire, but in the end I walked up to Rachel’s room to see for myself what she was doing.

  I knocked on the door. “It’s me,” I said. “Mom and Dad are in the study.” There was no answer, so I went in.

  She knelt by her open window with a sheaf of papers held together by a paper clip, with the economy-size box of kitchen matches beside her on the sill. She used a match to light a piece of paper and threw the match in a plastic cup of water, in which four other matches lay floating. She dropped the flaming page out the window.

  “They’re letters to my future husband,” she explained. “I wrote them when I was eight.”

  I watched her do this for another thirty seconds. Unable to say anything about it, I went to my room, and the object that didn’t feel tainted by my ownership of it was the acoustic guitar an aunt had lent me six months ago. I’d only learned six chords. But now I put it down only when my fingertips were in too much pain to touch anything, at which point I plugged in my headphones and worked methodically backward and forward through my booklet of CDs, listening in my desk chair, until
I could handle strings again.

  By the following evening, each of the fingertips on my left hand had grown a cloud: calluses. From that point forward, I put down the guitar only to eat dinner and to walk to a licentious Cumberland Farms, where I bought and experimented with cigarettes. Nobody asked me where I was going.

  Around ten o’clock that night, my father knocked on the door.

  “I’ve come to have a little talk with you,” he said. “Nancy, Khadijah, your behavior, my behavior.”

  He sat in my rolling desk chair. I put down my aunt’s guitar and sat on the floor with my legs tucked close to my chest, tapping an imaginary drumbeat against my knees in order to be musicianly. I waited. He opened his mouth several times and closed it again, like a goldfish.

  “Do you know any songs?” he asked. “I can hear you a little from downstairs. It sounds like you’re playing a lot.”

  I looked at the guitar. The truth was I was having a hard time with chords. I was also having a hard time with playing anything and singing at the same time. The one song I could pull off, sort of—it was actually easier than “Psycho Killer”—was “Heartbreak Hotel.” You could play “Heartbreak Hotel” as a bass line on the low E. And you barely had to sing and play at the same time. The singing was the call, the bass line the response.

  “Sure,” I said. I picked up the guitar. I couldn’t sing very well. But the vocal was basically talking: “Since my baby left me (guitar: BUM BUM) / I found a new place to dwell (BUM BUM).”

  My father spread his legs and clasped his hands in the space between them as I played and sang. He reached out and put his left hand on my right hand, which was still holding a tortoiseshell pick, hovering by the strings. Did he hear Nancy’s voice when he heard music, like I heard Khadijah’s?