Forgive me, Leonard Peacock

by Мэтью Квик Q

  It surprised her, and she took a step back, but she didn’t spray me.

  “How old are you?” she said.

  I said, “I’m seventeen.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Leonard Peacock.”

  “That’s a fake name if I ever heard one.”

  I said, “I can show you my school ID.”

  She said, “Let’s see it, but real slow. If you try anything funny, I’ll shoot you in the cornea.”

  I lowered my hands super slo-mo and said, “It’s in my pocket. May I reach into my jacket?”

  She nodded, so I produced my school ID.

  She took it, glanced at my name, and said, “Well, I’ll be damned. You really are Leonard Peacock. What a stupid name.”

  I said, “Why are you crying?”

  I saw her trigger finger twitch and I thought I was about to get maced, but instead she put my school ID into her purse and said, “Why are you following me, really? Did someone pay you? What do they want?”

  “No. It’s nothing like that at all.”

  She moved the Mace a few inches closer to my face, pointed at my left eye, and said, “Don’t fuck with me, Leonard Peacock. Did Brian put you up to this? Huh? Tell me!”

  I put my hands up again and said, “I don’t know any Brian. I’m just a dumb kid. I dress up like an adult and skip school every once in a while to see what being an adult is like. Okay? I just want to know if growing up’s worth it. That’s all. And so I follow the most miserable-looking adult to work, because I just know that’s going to be me someday—the most miserable adult on the train. I need to know if I can take it.”

  She said, “Take what?”

  I said, “Being a miserable adult.”

  She lowered her Mace. “Really?”

  I nodded.

  She said, “You’re absolutely crazy, aren’t you?”

  I nodded again.

  “But not dangerous, right? You’re a lamb.”

  I shook my head no, because I wasn’t a threat back then. And then I nodded, because I wasn’t a wolf or a lion or anything predatory at the time.

  She said, “Okay. Do you drink coffee?”

  ELEVEN

  She took me to this coffee place close to the alley where she stole my school ID. It was mostly old people eating bagels and slurping joe.

  She started talking about how stressed out she was and how there was this guy at her work named Brian whom she had screwed once and he was now using that against her because they were up for the same promotion. Her mother was dying in some hospice center in New Jersey, which was where she had spent the previous night. She had really wanted to stay with her mother because her mom was close to the end of her life, but this woman knew that—while no one would tell her she couldn’t be there for her mother’s passing—Brian would use her absence from work as a way to beat her out for the position.

  Or at least that’s what I understood.

  She was rambling and slurring words like she was drunk and she kept waving her hands and she wouldn’t take off her sunglasses even inside the coffee shop. She talked for an hour or so, and I was beginning to think she was a great big liar because if she left her dying mom to get ahead at work, why the hell would she waste her time with me at the coffee shop? Wouldn’t Brian use missing work—for any reason at all—against her?

  I was thinking about all of this when she said, “So what have you learned following around adults? Spying on us?”

  I said, “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t lie to me. You owe me an explanation, Leonard Peacock.”

  And so I swallowed and said, “I’m not finished researching, which is why I followed you today.”

  “What have you learned today from me?”

  “Truthfully?”

  She nodded.

  So I said, “You seem really unhappy. And most of the people I follow are the same. It seems like they don’t like their jobs and yet they also don’t like going home either. It’s like they hate every aspect of their lives.”

  She laughed and said, “You need to follow people on the train to figure that out?”

  And I said, “I was hoping that I had it wrong.”

  And she said, “Don’t all the kids in your high school seem miserable too? I hated high school. HATED it!”

  And I said, “Yeah, most of them do seem miserable. Although they try to fake it the best they can. Kids fake it better than adults, right? My theory is that we lose the ability to be happy as we age.”

  She smiled. “So if you’ve got it all figured out, why follow adults like me?”

  “Like I said before, I was hoping that I’m wrong, that life gets better for some people when they get older, and even the most miserable people—such as you and me—might be able to enjoy at least some aspect of adulthood. Like those ads where gay guys talk about being picked on in high school but then they grew up and discovered that adult life is like heaven. They say it gets better. I want to believe that happiness might at least be possible later on in life for people prone to sadness.”

  She swatted my words out of the air with her hand and said, “All ads are lies. Life doesn’t get better at all. Adulthood is hell. And everything I told you about myself was a lie too. I made everything up just to see who you were because I thought they paid you to be a spy. But the joke’s on me because you really are just a crazy, sad, underfed high school student who follows random people. That’s sick. Perverted. I’m keeping your ID and if I ever see you again I’m pressing charges and getting a restraining order.”

  She stood up and glared down at me through her huge sunglasses.

  “This little prick follows women into dark alleys and asks them intimate questions. He’s a true pervert. Do with him as you will,” she said loudly to everyone eating breakfast, and then her heels clicked out of the shop—POW! POW! POW! POW!

  I could tell everyone was still looking at me and so I shrugged and said, “Women!” too loudly. It was supposed to be a joke to break the tension, but it didn’t work. Everyone[23] in the coffee shop was frowning.

  I figured the woman was really deranged—I had simply picked a femme fatale to follow, there were surely better case studies to find, happier adults prone to sadness, and she was just an unlucky fluke—but the problem was that she sort of reminded me of Linda, who also thinks I’m a pervert.

  And what the 1970s sunglasses woman had said was so mean, public, and maybe true, that I started to cry right there, which made me really SEEM like a pervert.

  Not big boo-hoo tears.

  I pretty much hid the fact that I was crying, but my lips trembled and my eyes got all moist before I could wipe them away with my sleeve.

  “I’M NOT A FUCKING PERVERT!” I yelled at the people staring at me, although I’m not sure why.

  The words just sort of shot out of my mouth.

  I’M!

  NOT!

  A!

  FUCKING!

  PERVERT!

  They all winced.

  A few people stuck money under their utensils and left, even though they weren’t finished eating.

  This huge muscle-inflated tattooed cook came out from the kitchen and said, “Why don’t you just pay your bill and leave, kid? Okay?”

  Just like always I could tell I was the problem—that the coffee shop would be better off once I was no longer around—so I pulled out my wallet and handed him all my money even though we only had a coffee each, and in a normal speaking voice, I said, “I’m not a pervert.”

  No one would make eye contact with me, not even the cook, who was looking at the money now, maybe to make sure it wasn’t counterfeit, which is when I realized that the truth doesn’t matter most of the time, and when people have awful ideas about your identity, that’s just the way it will stay no matter what you do.

  So I didn’t wait for change.

  I got the hell out of there.

  I went to the park and watched the pigeons bob their heads and I felt so so lon
ely that I hoped someone would come along and stick a knife into my ribs just so they could have my empty wallet.

  I imagined all of my blood flowing out into the snow and watching it turn a beautiful crimson color as Philadelphians walked by in a great big hurry, not even pausing to admire the beauty of red snow, let alone register the fact that a high school kid was dying right in front of their eyes.

  The thought was comforting somehow and made me smile.

  I also kept oscillating between wanting that crazy 1970s sunglasses woman’s mom to die a horrible painful cringe-inducing death and wanting her mom to live and start to get healthier—younger even, like the two of them might even begin aging backward all the way to childhood—even though the femme fatale probably made the entire mother-dying story up just to mess with my head. But she had to have a mother who was either dead or elderly, and so it was nice to think of them getting younger together rather than older, regardless of whether they deserved it or not.

  It was a confusing day, and I felt like I was in some Bogart black-and-white picture where women are crazy and men pay hefty emotional fees for getting involved with “the fairer sex,” as Walt says.

  I remember skipping four days of school after my encounter with the 1970s sunglasses woman just so Walt and I could watch good old Bogie keep things orderly in black-and-white Hollywood land.

  My high school called a hundred million times before Linda checked the home answering machine[24] from NYC, and, to be fair, she actually had a driver bring her home that night and stayed with me for a day or two, because I was really fucked up—not talking and just sort of really depressed—staring at walls and pushing the heels of my hands into my eyes until they felt like they would pop.

  Any normal mom would have taken me to a therapist or at least a doctor, but not Linda. I heard her talking on the phone to her French boyfriend and she actually said, “I won’t let some therapist blame me for Leo’s problems.” And that’s when I really knew I was on my own—that I couldn’t count on Linda to save me.

  But somehow I pulled myself together.

  I started talking again, went back to school, and an extremely relieved Linda left me alone once more.

  Fashion called.

  There were camisoles[25] with built-in bras to design, so I, of course, understood her need to float away to New York.

  And life went on.

  TWELVE

  I walk into A.P. English halfway through the period and Mrs. Giavotella stares at me for just about seven minutes before she says, “How nice of you to join us, Mr. Peacock. See me after class.”

  My A.P. English teacher looks like a cannonball. She’s short and round and has these stubby limbs that make me wonder if she can touch the top of her head. She never wears a dress or a skirt but is always in overstuffed pants that are about to explode and a huge blouse that hangs down almost to her knees, covering her belly. A beaded line of sweat perpetually sits just above her upper lip.

  I nod and take my seat.

  The troglodyte football player who doesn’t even belong in A.P. but just so happens to sit directly behind me—that guy knocks my Bogart hat off my head and everyone sees my new fucked-up haircut before I can get my skull covered again.

  “What the—?” this girl Kat Davis whispers, making me realize my hair looks worse than I had imagined.

  Mrs. Giavotella gives me a look like she’s really worried for me all of a sudden, and I look back at her like please return to the lesson so everyone will stop looking at me because if you don’t I will pull the P-38 from my backpack and start firing away.

  “Mr. Adams,” Mrs. Giavotella says to the kid behind me. “If you were Dorian Gray—if there was a picture of you that changed according to your behavior, how would that picture look right about now?”

  “I didn’t knock Leonard’s hat off, if that’s what you’re implying. He knocked it off himself. I saw him do it. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Mrs. Giavotella looks at him for a second, and I can tell she believes him. Then she looks at me, like she’s wondering if I really did knock my own hat off, so I say, “Why would I knock my own hat off? What purpose would that serve?”

  “Why would you interrupt my lesson by arriving late?” she says, and then gives me this lame look that’s supposed to intimidate and control me—and it probably would on any other day. But I have the P-38 in my backpack, and therefore am uncontrollable.

  Mrs. Giavotella says, “So. Back to Mr. Dorian Gray.”

  I don’t really listen to the class discussion, which is all about a painting that gets uglier and uglier as its subject ages and becomes more and more corrupt, but magically never ages himself at all. It sounds like an interesting book, and I probably would have read it if I weren’t so obsessed with reading Hamlet over and over again. If I weren’t going to shoot Asher Beal and kill myself this afternoon, I’d probably read The Picture of Dorian Gray next. I’ve liked everything we’ve read in Mrs. Giavotella’s class this year, even though she’s always going on and on about the bullshit A.P. exam and dangling the college-credit carrot way more than she should. It’s almost obscene.

  Mostly, as I’m sitting here in A.P. English, I think about the way my classmates are always raising their hands and sucking up to Mrs. Giavotella just so she will give them As, which they will send to Harvard or Princeton or Stanford or where-fucking-ever, to go along with their lies about how much community service they supposedly did and essays about how much they care about poor minority children they’ll never meet in real life or how they are going to save the world armed with nothing but a big heart and an Ivy League education.

  “Save the world in your college application essays,” Mrs. Giavotella likes to say.

  If my classmates put as much effort into making our community better as they give to the college-application process, this place would be a utopia.

  Appearances, appearances.

  The great façade.

  How to Live Blindly in a Blind World 101.

  So much bullshit gets flung around in here, the stench gets so strong that you can hardly breathe. The best thing about killing myself will be that I’ll never have to go to a fake university and wear one of those standard college sweatshirts that’s supposed to prove I’m smart or something. I’m pretty proud of the fact that I will die without officially taking the SATs. Even though Linda and everyone here at my high school has begged me to take that stupid test just because I did so well on the practice one a few years ago.

  Illogical.

  Epic fail.

  Somehow the class ends and I remember I’m supposed to speak with Mrs. Giavotella, so I just stay put when everyone scrambles out the door.

  She walks over all slow and dramatic, sits on the desk in front of me so that her feet are resting on the seat, her knees clamped together tight so that I don’t get a direct view of her overly taxed zipper, which I appreciate very much, and says, “So, do you want to talk about what happened to your hair?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, then. Why exactly were you late for my class?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Not good enough.”

  “I’m thinking of dropping down to the honors track. You won’t have to worry about me then.”

  “Not a chance.”

  I’m not really sure what she wants from me, so I look out the window at the few leaves clinging to the small Japanese maple outside.

  She says, “I graded your Hamlet exam. How do you think you did?”

  I shrug.

  “Your essay was very interesting.”

  I keep looking at the few clinging leaves that seem to shiver whenever the wind blows.

  “Of course, you completely ignored the prompt.”

  “You asked the wrong question,” I say.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “No offense, but I think you asked the wrong essay question.”

  She
forces an incredulous laugh and says, “So you gave me the right question.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which was?”

  “You read my essay, right?”

  “Do you really think Shakespeare is trying to justify suicide—that the entire play is an argument for self-slaughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “But Hamlet doesn’t commit suicide.”

  “You did read my essay, right?”

  Mrs. Giavotella smoothes out her pant legs, rubbing her palms down her thighs, and then says, “I noticed you didn’t bring your copy of the text to the open-book test. And yet you quoted extensively. Do you really have so many quotes memorized? Is that possible?”

  I shrug, because why does that even matter? It’s like my English teacher gets off on having supposedly smart people in her class, and yet she doesn’t even realize what’s important about the books and plays we read. She doesn’t understand what’s important about me either.

  “Your essay was brilliant, Leonard. Perhaps the finest I’ve come across in all of my nineteen years of teaching. I read it several times. You have a real way with words. And your arguments—you could be a fantastic lawyer if you wanted to be.”

  I keep staring at those few clinging leaves, waiting for her to flip the praise into scorn like she always does.

  Who the fuck would want to be a lawyer? Being forced to argue for money—supporting sides you don’t even believe in.

  After a dramatic pause, she says, “But you didn’t answer any of the simple multiple-choice questions. Why?”

  “You only ask those to make sure everyone read the play,” I say. “My essay clearly proves that I read the play, right? I demonstrated proficiency, did I not?”

  “They were worth thirty points. You didn’t demonstrate the ability to follow simple directions. That counts in my class, and in life too. No matter how smart you may be, you’re going to have to follow instructions once you leave this high school.”

  I laugh because we’re talking about her grades and points as if they’re real or something. And knowing that I’m about to kill Asher Beal and then myself makes this conversation all the more absurd and irrelevant.