by James Franco
Across the parking lot, I looked back and saw Ivan messing with the scooter. The man in the leather jacket grabbed him and put him on the ground, and then started kicking him. I stopped running, but I didn’t go back. I just watched.
The Asian woman was in the front seat of the car. She looked over at me. She didn’t look sad for Ivan at all. When she started calling to the man in the leather jacket, I ran.
I saw Ivan at school on Monday. He had a black eye and his bottom lip was purple at the side. We never talked about the man with the leather jacket to each other, but Ivan told people about it. Ivan told the story like I had left 7-Eleven before the guy even came.
Brian was a kid from Los Angeles. He had a tattoo of an eight ball on his leg, but it was smeared. He wasn’t supposed to get it wet the day after he got it, but he took a shower. It looked like a drawing that had been wiped with a sponge.
I went with him to JJ’s house. JJ was a skateboarder. He had a half-pipe in his backyard. I wasn’t good on the half-pipe.
JJ had a BB gun. We stood in his backyard and shot at birds that flew overhead, but didn’t hit any.
JJ sold me the BB gun for $50.
When I had the BB gun, Ivan and Ed and Dan and Jerry and I took it out. We walked in the creek by my house, Matadero. It was a cement creek that ran from one side of town to the other. The water got really high when it rained. My dad said not to go in it. He said that every winter, when the water got high, kids would take a raft in it, and someone would drown.
But that was when I was little. When I was in eighth grade, we went into it all the time. Sometimes we would catch crawfish and step on them and they’d crunch. We also burned things down there: a stuffed bear that an ugly girl gave me on Valentine’s Day, sitting on a little wooden chair that my brother made. It smelled like chemicals.
We walked down the creek with a BB gun. Dan hit a bird, and it dropped to the dirt. It wasn’t dead, so he shot it a bunch more times until it stopped moving.
We shot at house windows from the creek. We made designs in the glass. We almost made a smiley face in one, but the eyes were crooked.
We walked down the creek, all the way to Hoover Park. Some men were working on a roof. They were bent over in construction hats and hammering boards. Jerry aimed at one of the men. He missed once, and then he hit him. The man stood up. The way he stood, we knew Jerry got him in the ass. The man looked around and then he ran to the side of the roof. We all ran back down the creek toward my house.
It was far to get back to my house. In the bottom of the cement creek the water was low and we ran down there. The bottom was covered in slime and it was easy to slip, but it was harder to see us down there because the cement walls on the sides were high.
We could see the construction man’s car stop on all the bridges over the creek. He was looking for us, and we ran faster.
Finally we made it back to my house.
Inside, we rested. We watched some of Diff’rent Strokes, and then everybody left.
Later, someone stole the BB gun. I don’t know who, but they’re out there shooting things.
In high school, Howard Vern got a paint pellet gun. The balls were brightly colored: yellow, green, red, blue, white, orange, and black. They were round and waxy like candy.
One night I slept over at Howard’s house. At midnight, Bill came by in his jeep. Bill was handsome, but retarded. It was hard for him to put sentences together, and his emotions were all fucked-up. Other days, he and I spent a lot of time smoking pot and doing pull-ups on a bar above his bedroom door.
I wasn’t friends with Jerry or Dan anymore. They played on the school sports teams, and started calling me a fag after I quit the football team. They said Ed and I were gay together. It made me want to stay away from Ed because everyone started saying we were gay. Some girls even made up a song and a dance about us. I never saw the dance, but I heard about it.
Bill and Howard and I drove around town thinking about things to shoot with the paint pellet gun. We shot stop signs and mailboxes, and we shot at the high school, but those things weren’t very fun.
“Let’s go shoot Alice Henderson’s house,” I said.
Alice was the girl who made up the gay dance about me. I think that she was mad at me, and at everyone because she was a slut, and everyone knew that she was a slut. I guess the song and dance helped her anger out.
Howard and Bill thought Alice Henderson’s was a great idea and we drove over to the richest part of town, at the end of University Avenue.
All the houses were very big in the area, but Alice’s was one of the biggest. Bill pulled up and I leaned out the backdoor window and fired. The pellets hit the house with a hard, wet sound. I spread the shots around the front of the house, and they left dark flowers on the side of the white wall. I kept thinking of the words crime, crime, crime, and faggot, faggot, faggot.
I was a dark agent of the night, delivering terror in the suburbs while the inhabitants slept. I was evil in anyone’s eyes, but in high school, underhanded action rules.
After Alice’s we wanted more so we shot some other houses. We shot Jerry’s house because he ditched me as a friend, and Eli Fox’s house because he was an annoying guy Howard knew from Hebrew school, and Anna Zimmerman’s house because she had a big crush on me and had no chin. She had given me the bear that we burned.
Later we got caught because Howard’s mom found paint on his clothes. She was a friend of Eli Fox’s parents. The Foxes turned us in and we had to do community service. Jerry called me a fag to my face in front of everyone at school, but he was too scared to start a fight. And I heard that Alice kept doing the gay dance about me.
* * *
Some people when they were young shot deer, and foxes. Faulkner shot a bear, Hemingway shot lions and a lot of things. Gangs shoot people for initiation.
We shot animals, and people. But they were all small animals, and we didn’t kill anyone.
Emily
He was so cute. Younger, but I didn’t care. He was a change from the assholes in my grade like Adam and Roberto who just wanted to fuck and do it in the ass. Or come on my face like a porn, and tell their friends about it. And with them I was always the last call.
The first time I saw Ryan was over at the Oldses’ house, John and Steve’s. Everyone would go over there all the time. John with all the sophomores and Steve with all the juniors. It was the hangout house. I was always there because Maddy Patten was going out with Steve.
Ryan was there one day. It was after school. He was in John’s room, sitting on the edge of the bed playing a video game. He had a black Yankees hat on and he looked like an angel. I could tell that he was different, sweeter than the others. He had pain in his eyes.
I stared at him without him knowing. Or maybe he knew. I came up with all these fantasies just watching him play the video game. I didn’t talk to him then.
Two weeks later, there was a party at the Patten twins’ house. They’re my best friends, Elsie and Maddy. The boys called Elsie “Last-Call” because her name sounded like “L-C.” Maddy was still with Steve.
At the party, we three were playing I Never with a bunch of other girls. Someone says, “I never… ,” and if you’ve done the thing that they say, like cheated on a boyfriend, you have to drink.
“I never had sex at school.”
I drank.
“I never had sex with two guys at once.”
I drank.
“I never had sex with three guys at once.”
When it was my turn to say “I never,” I had a hard time thinking of things to say. I said, “I’ve never been in love.” So stupid.
A couple of the girls drank. Elsie didn’t drink, but Maddy did, and I thought she was stupid because that meant that she loved Steve. But then I thought that maybe it wasn’t so stupid. There was something inside me that was saying that I was in love with Ryan, even though I had never talked to him. I had this feeling all of a sudden like I wanted to take care of him.
Then it was funny because he walked in. He was with John Olds and some sophomores. I stopped playing I Never and I went over to him.
“Hey,” I said.
His friends gave him looks. He acted shy. He was like a deer.
“Hey,” he said.
“You wanna play quarters?”
He and his friends and me and some junior girls played. Pork, and Adi, and the Pattens, and me versus the sophomore boys.
We were playing on the island in the kitchen. I’m very good at quarters. They were very bad, and we killed them. After a while they all looked sick. We played eight rounds and they got it in once. On the eighth round, Ryan’s friends each took a tiny sip because they couldn’t take anymore. They left the whole pitcher for Ryan.
“You gotta drink it all, shithead,” said Pork. She was a porker. All the guys called her Pork because she had big tits and a big ass, she was loud and rude, and her hair was big and brown and curly like a beast’s. I told her to shut up. Ryan took the pitcher in both hands and drank. It started spilling around the sides of his mouth and onto his shirt. He got wet and then wetter. He couldn’t finish it all.
“Finish the backwash,” said Pork.
“Shut up, Pork,” I said.
I never called her Pork to her face. Elsie laughed.
“Fuck you, bitch, go ahead and play with your little kids,” said Pork, and she left the kitchen. I laughed. Elsie said she was going to piss, and the other girls left. Ryan was trying to take big breaths, but he was doing it very slowly. He was swaying.
“Do you need some air?” I asked.
I took him to the backyard, but a bunch of the junior and senior guys were out there. We went around to the side of the house, to a little side yard. Above, there was a trellis with jacaranda flowers; underneath it was dark and cool. He put one hand on the fence and hung his head. He breathed slowly. Then he crouched low to the ground. He threw up against the fence. I laughed a little, but only to myself. I put my hand gently on the top of his head. After he was done I helped him up under his arm. We stood for a minute in the cool dark. He was hunched with his hands on his thighs. We said nothing, but it was like we were talking. Finally, I asked if he wanted some water.
We were back in the kitchen, and I got a glass from the cupboard and took some water from the sink. He took a sip. Then he took another one. Through the kitchen door I could see Pork talking to Adam and some other guys. They were looking toward me and laughing. Adam made a gesture and smiled. I turned back to Ryan.
“You feel better?”
He nodded. He did look a little better. He finished the water. I took the glass and put it in the sink.
“Follow me,” I said. I took his hand. We went upstairs. I led him down the hall to the twins’ parents’ room. He didn’t say anything. I told him to sit on the side of the bed. I told him to lie back and he did. His feet were on the floor. Then I undid his pants. I pulled his boxer shorts down to his feet. I did it for a while. He made sounds.
I stopped. I said, “Do you want to do anything else?”
He said, “No.”
After it was finished, he pulled his pants back up. I sat on the side of the bed next to him. I asked him if he liked it.
We went downstairs. At the bottom of the stairs I stopped and he kept walking. The party was dying, but there were still people there. These people seemed slow and drunk and smiley and evil. I went into the kitchen to get some water. I went to the sink and picked up the glass Ryan used before. There was some water in it and someone had put a cigarette in it. I cupped my hands and drank right from the faucet. I turned off the water and walked out toward the living room, where I had seen Adam before. Now Ryan was sitting on the couch with Adam. Adam was laughing. Ryan was laughing too in a shy way.
When Stacey died no one knew what happened. It was after the homecoming dance. Of course Stacey was sophomore princess. She was that kind of person. A cheerleader. She was going out with Casey McDonald, and it was weird because it seemed like Casey really liked her. They were going out for six months. I saw them over the summer, at Steve Olds’s, and one time at Lake Tahoe during the Fourth of July. It was crazy. We were at a huge party. One thousand people at one house. Tosh Masuda was there with Adam and all those guys. Tosh had a gun, and when the fireworks started going off, Tosh started shooting the gun in the air. It was really stupid; the bullets could have fallen back and hit someone.
And Casey and Stacey were there, and it was so weird because Casey actually looked happy. Before Stacey, he hated girls. He and Byron would just fuck them and treat them like shit. He was in Roberto’s club, the Dirty Dozen. They all competed to see who could fuck the most girls. Sometimes they videotaped it.
But there he was, with Stacey, watching the fireworks. Both were holding red keg cups, and they had big smiles on their faces, even when Tosh was shooting the gun. And I had never had that. I had never had a boyfriend. I had never watched fireworks with anyone.
Homecoming was just like every other dance, it wasn’t a big event. We weren’t in Texas. The twins and I got pretty drunk and we stood in the corner of the gym and snuck apricot schnapps from my purse and laughed at the idiots. I didn’t see Ryan. I wanted to call him but I didn’t have his number. I saw John Olds and I asked him where Ryan was. He said that Ryan was out of town for the weekend.
After that I wanted to leave. The ceremony was going on. Stacey was up there with the other princesses. Then they had the Royal Court Dance. Stacey ditched her sophomore prince and danced with Casey. His eyes were closed and her eyes were closed. I guess it was their last dance. Guns N’ Roses were playing.
I went outside to have a cigarette. Adam was out there smoking. He was drunk. He told me to follow him, and we went to the pool. We walked to the place in the fence behind the diving boards where the barbed wire is fucked up. He climbed the fence and jumped over.
He told me to climb over. I threw my purse to him and I climbed, but it was harder than I thought. My heels kept getting caught. I should have taken them off. When I got over I was tired.
He wanted to get into the pool and I said no. He took his clothes off. He had a swimmer’s body. He was very good-looking. Like an Israeli hero. Freshman year he was too pretty; he looked like a girl. Then he became a man.
He jumped in the pool and he was in the pool, swimming around naked.
“Get in the pool, Emily.”
“No.”
“Get in the fucking pool.”
“No.”
Another night I would have, but it didn’t seem fun that night. It was old and familiar. Adam was mad because he could tell I was changing.
“You can be a real cunt, you know that?”
He was swimming toward the side of the pool like a shark. I started backing away. He got out, naked; I knew he was going to throw me in, and I had my dress on. I ran but I was in my heels. At the fence, I looked back and he was coming, his dick was flapping. I tried to climb, but he grabbed me off the fence. I screamed. He carried me over his shoulder. I scratched his back and bit his shoulder. He kept walking, and then threw me in.
Once I was in, he started putting his clothes back on. I was yelling at him and trying to splash him so that his clothes would be wet too, but I didn’t get him. My dress came up around me like a silver-pink jellyfish.
When he was dressed, he climbed the fence and left. I floated for a while in the black water and then I climbed out. My purse was by the fence. I picked it up and took out a cigarette and sat at the edge of the pool and let my legs dangle in the water with my heels on.
There was a moon and it was on the water. A miniature moon rocking on the little waves. I always see nice images like that but I don’t know what to do with them. I guess you share them with someone. Or you write them down in a poem. I had so many of those little images, but I never shared them or wrote any of them down.
I smoked the whole cigarette and then flicked it into the pool. I lit another one and stood up in my wet dress and walke
d to the fence. I took a drink of apricot schnapps. I took my heels off and threw them over the fence. I climbed and this time the fence hurt my toes and feet. I picked up my shoes and went back to the dance, dripping water as I went.
The two mothers at the door gave me a funny look, but I walked past before they could say anything. Inside, everyone was dancing to Dr. Dre. I saw Adam on the other side of the gym with Byron and Roberto. Adam’s hair was still wet and slicked back. They were laughing. I walked around and walked up behind Adam and I poured my apricot schnapps over his head.
Roberto made a noise like “Ooooooooo.” All the schnapps hadn’t come out before Adam turned around, so I started flinging it in his face. He tried to grab my arms. He grabbed the left one, the one without the bottle. I kept splashing it in his face and he couldn’t get my right arm to make me stop. Roberto was laughing a lot in the background, and everyone around made a circle because I was yelling and calling Adam a Jew motherfucker. Finally he slapped me across the face. I swung the bottle and it hit him above his eye. Then I dropped the bottle and it broke on the floor.
That was when Mr. Forest, the dean, tried to break it up, but Adam had already grabbed me. He threw me on the gym floor. There was a squeaking sound, like basketball shoes during a game.
They sat us in the medic’s room, where the athletes usually go, and called our parents, but my mom didn’t answer. They kept me there until she answered. One hour later she answered and then she came and they told her what happened. We drove home and my mom wasn’t very mad at me.
Later at home, my mom and I were smoking cigarettes at the kitchen table. All the lights were out except for the one in our little kitchen nook. The place was filled with smoke. Then the phone rang. For a second I thought about Ryan, but my mom said it was Adam. I walked over and hung it up.
“You don’t want to talk to him?”
“He’s an asshole, they all are.”
“Are you going to break up?”
“He’s not my boyfriend!”
We sat and smoked. It was dark except for the overhead light, which was brown-yellow. Everything seemed yellow: the fridge, the kitchen table. The living room rug was a dirty yellow. My mom’s face, and the camel on the box. I saw me and my mom from outside my head. Two yellow-haired women sitting across a yellow table in a yellow kitchen full of smoke.