Kal the Ender was super twisted.
The people of Earth grew wary of him, but they didn’t know what to do.
Wherever they imprisoned Kal the Ender, he would escape.
Then I, Remote, devised a plan. “On the moon,” I said to the Earthlings, “there is one called Mun who desperately wants a son, and we might implore him to take Kal the Ender off our hands to raise as his own.”
It was one of the best ideas they had ever had, because this was long before Earthlings thought of cool things. This was way before medicine and way before automobiles.
Remote climbed the tallest mountain and I shouted up at Mun my proposition. To take Kal the Ender off our hands.
“I hadn’t really hoped to have a murderer son,” Mun said.
“He won’t have murdered anyone on the moon,” I said. “And, most of his problems stem from bad parenting. You will be a great father, and Kal the Ender will change his ways.”
Mun liked the sound of that. “I’ll take him,” he said.
Of course, Kal the Ender would not go on his own, so Remote invented a trap. We put several dozen boys at the end of a path, and just in front of the boys, we put a snare made from Mun’s infinite beard.
Kal the Ender was told of the boys, and he hurried off down the path to catch them and murder them.
Alas, when he got just about where they were, Mun gave a great tug on his beard and hoisted Kal into the heavens.
Once Kal was gone, a great order came to the lives of the Earthlings. This was in large part due to the fact that Mun was not as good of a parent as he thought he would be.
Once every so often, Kal would kill Mun. But every time he died, Mun’s infinite beard revived him. You could tell when Mun was dead, because you couldn’t see the moon. The moon’s cycle—when it was there and when it was gone—we called months. The months were divided into weeks. The weeks into days. And Remote charted the days on the Graph of Kal the Ender. The first of those days, Remote called Monday after Mun on the moon. How the months were named and how weeks came to be is a story no one remembers.
The only thing that makes my best friend, Bennet, half-black is his hair. Well, that and his daddy. But if you shaved his head with a razor he could pass as white. I mean, he’d look sick or something, but you’d think he was a struggler. Back during Jim Crow, that’s what he would’ve done, but these days it’s best to be black, so he lets it get fluffy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure when he sees a cop he wishes his hair was gone, and every time we go into a convenience store, the clerks are always trying to decide whether or not they should follow him to see if he steals, but on the internet he’s got it made. He’s got like eight hundred Twitter followers and he can only get online on my phone. His mom hates the internet.
When Bennet heard I was suspended, he told his mom he was too scared to go to school on Monday on account of the shootings, so she let him stay home, but she made him promise to go back the next day.
“I’m not raising sissies,” she told him.
“She gonna let you out the house, or she gonna make you stay inside?” I asked when Bennet told me.
“How’s she gonna know? And we should’ve had Presidents’ Day off anyhow.”
“Yeah, I bet you wanted to celebrate Trump. Make him a card or something. Send it up to the White House.”
“Shit. I ain’t one of the ‘good ones.’”
I had decided to be productive with my week off. I was gonna follow the Bicycling Confederate just to see what his game was, but I felt like that would be a weird thing to ask Bennet to do, and I didn’t want to tell Bennet we couldn’t hang on account of that. Can you imagine? He asks to hang out and I’m like, “Nah, bruh, I’m gonna follow that Bicycling Confederate.”
So, I decided to sleep in on Monday and hang that day with Bennet, but I forgot to tell Peggy and she came pounding on my door at six-fifteen. “Get up, get up.” She yelped, and moved instead to pound her palm on the wall close to my bed.
I had stayed up late the night before watching YouTube videos. One was like a breakdown of Kendrick Lamar’s lyric “What’s the yams” from the track “King Kunta.” It showed all the literary references from his bars. It said some of the lines were from The Color Purple and some of the lines were from Roots, and it said the yams stuff was from The Invisible Man, but not the H. G. Wells novel where the man’s actually invisible, and when Peggy woke me I remembered that yams bit and then all of a sudden I started thinking about sweet potatoes, because maybe I was still half dreaming, and then my mind was like: I wonder if people eat sweet potato pie in Indiana? and then I looked at the clock and I was like, “What the fuck, Peggy?”
She smacked the wall one more time. “It’s time.” Smack. “School.” Smack again.
“You serious?” I said. I pulled my blankets all up on me. “I’m suspended, man.”
“Suspended?”
“Means I can’t go.”
“I know what it means. Fucktard. You didn’t tell me.” She was wearing almost nothing, and she folded her arms I guess so I couldn’t see her nipples poking through her shirt and her hair was in pigtails and, man, that just wasn’t fair. “How long?”
“All week.”
“The fuck you do?”
My eyes felt tight and I rubbed them. “Nothing really. Wrote something. Asked something. Said something. I dunno.”
“Wrote something, asked something? So I got up for nothing?” She threw up her arms, and it’s weird being my age. “You didn’t tell me not to wake you up.”
“You do everything I don’t tell you not to do?” And as soon as it left my mouth, I tried to understand what I’d said.
“What?” she said. “Nonsense-making little . . .” and I guess she wandered off to go back to sleep. But I always have a hard time sleeping once I’m up, and I just lay there thinking about Peggy. She’s only six years older than me. I’m really not that young. My uncle is only twenty-eight. He took me on because if he did he got a monthly check. And I figured that was why I hadn’t seen him for a few days—because he was off with my money getting high. He used to take my work money too. I worked at a grocery store as a bagger for a while, but when Uncle Joe didn’t let me keep my checks I decided to get fired, because there’s no point in working if you’re not really getting paid. But my uncle’s was the easiest place I’d ever lived. I had my own room. And he got me a phone. And if I got suspended a week no one seemed to care at all.
My room was still pretty dark, so I turned on my phone’s flashlight, and I blasted Remote on the wall and kind of had him talk at me a bit, and after a while, I guess I was asleep again.
The next thing I remember was Bennet knocking on my window.
We live in the same apartment complex, Bennet and I, but he has a nicer unit because his mother’s a nurse. She’s always working. She’s Bennet’s white half, and she’s ugly as hell, which I think means Bennet’s daddy must have been a fucking god, because Bennet is one of the prettiest boys I’ve ever seen. Half-black people are usually good looking. Obama, Steph Curry, Halle Berry. Blake Griffin is an ugly motherfucker and Klay Thompson looks like an android. But Bennet looks like he’ll find out he’s gay while doing modeling and I’ll see him on a poster someday, and I’ll smile like crazy.
Straight guys will tell you they don’t think about how other guys look, but that’s a lie. I mean, ugly motherfuckers can have lots of guy friends, but there’s gotta be a kind of definition to their ugliness. They have to look like animals or super villains. But I’ve always preferred having handsome friends. And Bennet’s funny too.
One time we went up to Kroger to get snacks, and we passed through the produce section and an old white woman with skin like a scrotum was setting carrots in her cart and Bennet asked her, “Ma’am, do you use your carrot tops?”
She looked at Bennet like he was batshit crazy. “Use them?”
“Not everyone does,” said Bennet. “But I like good carrot tops.”
She touched the curly, green carrot leaves. “How do you even?” she asked.
“The normal way.”
“Normal?”
“If you ain’t gonna use ’em, ma’am, and it’s not too much my asking, do you mind if I take them off your hands? I mean if you’re just gonna throw them out when you get home.”
“Well . . .” she looked around like maybe she was being watched. “I guess that’s fine.”
And Bennet reached down and tore off the tops and walked them over to a roll of paper towels they had hanging there for customers to use, and he pulled off a piece, or a square or whatever you call it, and he began to twist up that carrot leaf in that paper towel like it was a joint. I mean, that’s what it looked like. A joint the size of a baby’s leg. And when it looked about as perfect as he could make it, he stuck it in his back pocket, put two fingers over his lips and shushed that old lady. Said, “Just between you and me.” Said, “If I get caught, I won’t tell anyone you gave it to me.” And then we bought chips and ran about, and whenever one of us is feeling low we’ll say, “Could go for some curly carrot leaf about now.”
Also, Bennet is smart. Kid makes straight As. He’s going to college for sure. Which is kinda crazy considering how much he loves dinking around on the internet.
When he came knocking at my window at about ten o’clock or something, the first thing he said when I pulled back the blinds and raised the glass was, “Lemme see your phone.”
“Uh, good morning to you too, motherfucker.”
“Father fucker.” He winked, reached his hand inside. “Phone?” He grinned his pretty mouth at me.
And that’s the thing about Bennet—he’s too pretty to say no to. That old lady in the produce section probably even had the hots for him. Probably thought about him tearing off her curly carrot leaves when she was cooking those carrots. Probably simmered them in butter and tossed wild ideas about his half-black ass in the back of her mind.
Bennet crawled through my window and sat on a beanbag chair in the corner of my room, messed on my phone, and I pulled on pants, got ready for the day.
“You’re smart, right?” I asked Bennet.
His eyes were lost in my phone, but he answered, “I guess.”
“You read and shit?”
“’Bout as much as you.”
“Yeah, but you read different shit. Have you read the black invisible man? The one that isn’t invisible.”
He looked up from the phone. “Is this like a riddle? The black invisible man that isn’t black? How the fuck is he black then?”
“Nah, man. I don’t think it’s a riddle. It’s why I’m asking.”
“Like, is water wet?”
“What?”
“Is water wet?”
“Sure it is. Ain’t it?”
Bennet googled something on my phone, waited for results, tapped a link with his pinky finger—because I’d watched him with my phone enough to know he scrolled with his right thumb and tapped links with his left pinky—and he held up the pointer finger of his left hand and read, “Water isn’t wet. Wetness is a description of our experience of water; what happens to us when we come into contact with water in such a way that it impinges on our state of being. We, or our possessions, ‘get wet.’”
“You’re making me wet,” I told him.
“Shit,” he said.
“There’s this invisible man that has something to do with Kendrick Lamar’s yams.”
His eyes tightened at me. “You’re tripping.”
I messed my hair in place and put on a hat. “Maybe,” I said.
After I ate some breakfast—a handful of fake Cheerios—I asked Bennet what he wanted to do.
“This,” he told me, and kind of held up my phone.
“All day?”
“All day.”
I looked out the window. “Not me,” I said. “It’s supposed to be kinda nice.” I missed the sun from South Texas. There, the sun shined like every day. We never really had winter. Our worst season was summer. It’d be over 100 degrees for three months in a row. At least it felt like it. And while I grumbled about that much sun when I was back home, now that I was being subjected to so many gray days, I missed it. When you have too much of something it begins to mean nothing to you. It was like when my mom and dad were alive. They’d come around and hug on me and I’d brush them away. Especially if I was in a bad mood. Like if they’d just had me clean my room or something. But if they came up and hugged me now, I’d be cool with it.
“I gotta get out in the sun if there is any,” I told Bennet.
“How much data you got?”
Data was such a precious thing, man. My uncle let me have a phone, but he’d kick my ass if I went over my limit. It only happened once, and I didn’t really fight back any.
He came into my room holding up a bill and said, “You’ve gone over.”
“Huh?” I was in my beanbag chair.
“Your fucking limit, phone boy.”
“Huh?”
“Huh me one more time and it’s gonna be worse.”
“Worse?”
“Fuck with a man’s money and you get hands.”
“Hands?”
My uncle dropped the bill and picked up his fists. He smiled. “Just a good-natured ass-kicking.”
That was the thing about my uncle. It must’ve been why Peggy loved him. Even when he was being a dick, he seemed lovable. He kicked my ass that day chuckling the whole time. “Gonna go over data again?” He smiled at me.
“Nah.” My nose was bleeding.
He jabbed my ribs twice more and then gave me a hug and kissed my cheek. I could smell his hot-alcohol breath, his Axe body spray. “Damn, nephew, you took that good.” Then he gave me a beer, and we arm wrestled and he let me win.
Bennet tapped a few things on my phone. “You got plenty of data,” he said.
We made to leave out the front door but on the way out Peggy stopped me. “Where you going?”
“Out.”
“No shit, but where?”
“No exact destination.”
“I can’t find your fucking uncle.”
“You text him?”
“Texted. Called. Facebook messaged. Tweeted at.” She had her phone and was scrolling on it. “Like he just dropped off the face of the earth.”
“I mean, yeah. That’s Uncle Joe.” He was in and out. He was there and gone. Dragging through life the way he did.
Peggy looked at selfie view on her phone and messed with an eyelash. “I know where he was on Saturday and I know where he was supposed to be yesterday.”
“So what’s the big deal? He’ll be around soon. This afternoon or tomorrow.”
Peggy messed with her lip, still in selfie mode. “If he’s not back by tomorrow, I’ll officially be worried. Right now I’m concerned. Rent’s up on Friday. And that’s when it’s up up. That’s the latest we can pay. So unless you find your uncle or eight hundred dollars . . .”
“You want me to give you eight hundred dollars?”
“I want someone to.”
“If I gave you eight hundred dollars, what would you give me?” I lifted my chin toward her.
“A place to stay.”
“I guess I’ll keep my eyes open then.”
We got outside and Bennet was like, “Smooth, struggler.”
“She thinks I’m too young.”
“You are too young.”
“Nah. Age is a number. You get to a certain age, you’ve got all the magic you’ll ever have.”
“Hopefully you haven’t reached that age yet.”
“Fuck you, struggler.”
Now, let me take a minute to explain the word struggler, bec
ause it’s an important word to me and only me. It’s my word. Mine and Erika’s. She’s my friend from back on the border. Mexican as they come. Calls herself Latina. And Chicana. And other shit I can’t remember.
Anyhow, she was my best friend down there since I got there in fifth grade. I was ten and I hadn’t grown up on the border, so my Spanish was nothing. I mean, I really didn’t know anything beyond hola, and on the first day I was in math class, a few of the kids started calling me güero. And I’d heard that, except when Mexicans say it they say “wed-O” and when white people say it they say “where-O,” but either way it’s basically like “white boy.” But it’s weird, because you can use it good and you can use it bad. Well, I guess the word Mexican is like that too. And the word Jew. And the word black. But with güero it’s more complicated than that. But it’s not as complicated as the N-word. Cause like, with the N-word, it can mean like the absolute best and the absolute worst. Güero can only mean kinda bad or kinda good.
Let me give you an example.
If you see a white boy, and you don’t like him, and your tone is a bit flat, and you say “güero,” it’s kinda like you just called him fucker.
But you can have a friend who is a light-skinned Mexican, and if you call him güero it’s kind of a term of endearment. Like honey. Or blondie. Or slick.
These kids weren’t calling me honey, or blondie, or slick. They were calling me güero.
I was the only white kid in the class, and that had never happened to me before. I was nervous, and I didn’t want to feel nervous. Before I went to school I was like, “Blend in. Be cool.” But my mind kept racing.
I didn’t blend. I froze. I went to school and I felt the strangest sensation. I felt like I had wandered into an alternative world. It seemed that everybody noticed me. And while that’s probably how it feels the first day of any new school, it was worse, because I felt so different.
I probably seemed like fresh fish at jail. You could probably taste my fear like skunk stink. And then some of the kids started calling me güero, and that’s when Erika took up for me. She spit some lickety-split Spanish at the other kids in class, and when the kids quit teasing me, she extended her hand and we were introduced.
Opioid, Indiana Page 2