Bad Kid (20 page)

“Just tell me why you love me,” I asked again.

He sighed and tossed down a ball of socks. “I love you because
you're my son,” he answered, looking at me blankly for a moment before returning to his packing.

Later this night, lying in my bed with my headphones on, I stared at that old, wrinkled greeting card. I read and reread it for half an hour, unsure whether it belonged in the box of things I'd be taking to my new life or in the garbage.

A
lot changed after Brownie-gate. I hadn't been the only one called into the school office that day. It had been a shakedown. One by one we'd fallen like dominoes when confronted with our forged letters, admitting to a myriad of bad behavior. A few of our friends got sent to alternative school. Some were forced to go to rehab. Others just disappeared.

It was a sad time made sadder by my leaving, and we all couldn't have been happier to feel so sad about it. If you ever want to see goth kids step up to the plate and own their brand, just give them a reason to say good-bye. My last week of school was a black celebration of morbidity, as evidenced by my growing collection of dark poetry, sad mixtapes, and moody charcoal sketches. Greg performed a suicide-themed dance for me at school, choreographed to Depeche Mode's “Blasphemous Rumors.” In it, he bounded across the small black-box theater
in a black cloak with a red silk scarf, which he used to simulate sprays of blood and swinging nooses. It was disturbing and baroque, and one of the gayest things I'd ever seen. It was also the most amazing gift anyone had ever given me.

After class we all reminisced in the grocery-store parking lot next to school, chain-smoking and drinking whiskey from Jake's flask. I had to be in Seguin by 6 p.m. for dinner. So at five o'clock I started saying good-bye, which takes forever when goth teenagers are involved.

“David,” said Greg, “let's hotbox in the car real quick.”

Greg and I jumped in his little Cabriolet and rolled up the windows, letting it fill up with pot smoke. “Oh L'Amour” played on the stereo, reminding me of all those road trips we'd taken together when so much was still unspoken. The car looked different now than it had a year ago. The dashboard, like the bumpers, was matted with Cure and Bauhaus stickers. Every few feet of the interior was marked with a cigarette burn or a splash of dried nail polish.

“I'm gonna miss you so much,” said Greg. I would only be an hour away, but we both knew things were about to change.

“I don't think my mother's going to let me do anything for a while. She says I can't leave Seguin at all until the end of summer.”

“I know. I think my mom's clamping down too,” said Greg, taking a deep puff on the joint. “Fucking Brownie.”

“Yeah,” I sighed. “Fucking Brownie.”

“Hey,” said Greg, taking a toke. “Come here.”

Greg leaned toward me, his hand reaching up around the back of my head. He closed his eyes as his lips parted to meet mine. I leaned in to him, letting my lungs fill up with the smoke
he was releasing into my body. And then we kissed. I wrapped my fingers around the jagged crook of his jawline, feeling a bit of stubble along his sideburn with my thumb. Greg's hand slipped around my waist to pull me closer. And then, as I released him from my grip . . . I felt nothing.

We looked quizzically at each other, knowing that what had just happened was somehow inevitable. It should have been a mind-blowing kiss, at least for me. Yet after all that sexual tension and endless waiting, it was pretty anticlimactic. As Greg turned up the stereo and lit two cigarettes, it was clear that neither of us felt much of anything special.

Greg handed me a cigarette and smiled. “I love you, David.”

In a way I couldn't put my finger on, I was never so sure that Greg was my best friend. “I love you too.”

“Did you give him the present?” yelled Raven, hopping into the back seat.

“Oh yeah! We got you this.” Greg slipped me a small, tinfoil-wrapped square.

“It's white blotter. Good shit,” added Raven, planting a bloodred kiss on my cheek. “For when Seguin starts to kill you.”

I drove away at 5:45, knowing I'd be late but not really caring. In the rearview mirror I watched my friends load into Greg's car and thought about what their plans were for the weekend. I hadn't asked and didn't want to know. And although it hurt my heart a bit, it made me happy to think they'd probably have a great time without me.

An hour later, I pulled up to our quaint little house on the outskirts of town and lit a cigarette. I sat in my car and glared at the place, with its flower-filled window boxes, twenty-foot clothesline, and gravel driveway. On one side of the house was
a field of dairy cattle; on the other, a Primitive Baptist cemetery. These were my new neighbors: bulge-eyed cows and baby corpses from the late 1800s. Five minutes later I finally willed myself to go inside.

“You're grounded!” snapped my mom, removing baked beans from the oven.

“What? I was in the driveway a few minutes ago!”

“You're late, mister,” said Mike casually, strolling into the kitchen. “We have rules here. Rules that start
now
.”

“But it was my last day and I was saying good-bye.”

“Sorry, buddy. That's the way it goes,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

“Mom?” I whined.

“Honey, this is your first day here and you couldn't even get home on time!”

“But my friends—”

“The school only agreed to pass you because they knew you were leaving,” she said. “It's a miracle you even passed your last exams!”

“But Mom—”

“Your history teacher didn't even know who you were!”

“But she only started a month ago—”

“David!” She shushed me. “Your mother loves you and accepts your new gay identity, but . . .”

“Oh God, Mom. Stop with that!”

“Well, would you rather me be like your father?” she bellowed, slamming a pepper mill down on the counter. “I'm going to respect you and you're going to respect ME!”

My mother had never yelled like that before. I looked at her in her denim apron covered with little drawings of cows and chickens,
standing over a boiling pot as her stepchildren set the table for dinner. This was who she was now: a homemaker with a husband and family. And I was an outsider who had never asked to be a part of it.

I stormed into my room: a large, carpeted, windowless cell in the center of the house. Mike had offered me other bedroom options, but I'd angrily insisted on that one.

“Who needs fucking windows anyway?” I'd said, hoping he'd see how miserable I was going to be. Mike, pulling out all the stops to ease my transition, agreed to redecorate the room any way I wanted. In a move that was both goth
and
gay, I demanded gray walls and track lighting. My furniture was made from cinder blocks I'd salvaged from Mike's work shed. My elbows and shins were already covered in nicks and scrapes from a week of accidental run-ins with my desk and shelving. I had designed a pretty mournful place for myself. A dark, windowless room full of sandpaper furniture lit by harsh spotlights did
not
make for a peaceful place of solitude.

Being in the center of the house meant sharing a wall with almost every room. I could hear it all: my mother humming in the kitchen, my stepsister singing along to the radio, and my brother playing video games. My new brother and sister were truly foreign creatures, their day-to-day lives full of banalities. I hadn't been around twelve-year-olds since I'd
been
a twelve-year-old. One day, after listening to constant scraping from Mickey's room, I went next door and found him hacking at a two-by-four with a pocketknife.

“Mickey, what are you doing?”

He looked up at me and shrugged as a cow from next door appeared in the window and let out a long, mournful
“mooooo.”
Is that what this place will do to me?
I thought.
How long until I'm sitting in silence alone on the floor of my room hacking at wood with a knife?
I sat in my gray room full of random noise and wrote these fears in a journal I named Claude, the only friend I had. My bedroom wasn't a place to sleep. It was a place to stew.

After two boring weeks in my cave, I had to get out of the house. I decided to drive down Highway 123 into Seguin, the actual town. Seguin proper was all very beige. And wooden. And concrete. Two facing strip malls seemed to house every business that anyone in town would ever dream of visiting, including Walmart. I smoked a bit of my last bag of weed and went inside the superstore. Surrounding me were men and women with teased hair and fanny packs, old people with melting faces riding electric wheelchairs, and dads with handlebar mustaches yelling at their kids. I could feel them watching me, sizing me up, recognizing me as an out-of-towner.

On my way home I passed the courthouse and pulled a U-turn to check out the famous giant pecan mounted in front. Looking at it closely, I could see that it was covered in deep pockmarks that revealed that it was actually a concrete sculpture and not, in fact, an actual two-foot-long nut. Passersby looked at me strangely, probably confused as to why anyone would take such an interest in their big counterfeit nut.

“Them ol' kids come on down and raise hell on dat thang!”

I turned to see an ancient woman in hot-pink lipstick. Her face looked to be made of saddle leather, and her spider-veined arms barely held her up on her walker. “Dagnabbit! Those hellions 'n' their shootin'.”

“Excuse me, ma'am. What?”

“Those li'l sons-o'-bitches!” she groaned as her dentures slid down from behind her upper lip. “All summer they shoot at that-there pee-can wit' dare bee-bee guns!”

She continued to cuss as she strolled away from me, one of her pendulous breasts hanging six inches lower than the other beneath her Dallas Cowboys T-shirt. I tried to imagine what school here in the fall would be like, knowing that I'd probably never gel with high-schoolers who shot at fake legumes for fun.

That night I waited until everyone fell asleep and dropped my hit of white blotter. I stole myself a rum and Dr. Pepper and trudged to the Primitive Baptist cemetery with my journal and cigarettes. As the acid kicked in, I laid myself across the graves of a couple who had died on the same day in 1914. I lit a dozen tea candles and surrounded myself with them. I smoked and wrote for seven hours, drifting in and out of a coma-like nap as the sun came up. It was perhaps my gothest moment ever. And no one was there to see it.

Walking back to the house, I noticed a squirrel perched beneath a tree by the back door. It was standing perfectly still on its hind legs and staring at me intently, like it was going to say something. I crept toward it cautiously.

“Hey there, little guy. What are you doing?” I got closer and closer, ten feet, then eight feet, and then five feet. “Well, aren't you a brave little squirrel?”

His large black eyes stared into me, all-knowing. As I leaned down to him, I became convinced that he had something important to share.

“Do you have something to say to me? Who are you?”

“What the hell are you doing?” Mike yelled, shocking me off my feet. As I fell forward onto the squirrel, I could feel the hard,
molded plastic of its artificial body mash into my face. I sat up quickly in an attempt to play it cool. But it was too late. Mike was convulsing in laughter. He slid down the screen door until he was on his haunches, covering his face and wheezing.

“You . . . thought . . . it . . . was . . . real . . .” he guffawed.

Mike was so entertained by this that he didn't even ask me why I was up at 6:30. He simply chuckled and patted me on the back. “You're weird, just like your mama.”

I spent that day locked in my room, nursing a hangover and calling all my friends from San Antonio, none of whom answered. I read the deep and meaningful poetry I'd written the night before and had no idea what it was about.

Locked in Catatonia
,

A place to build a black brick home

Where you calmly arrange

Aunt Laura's remains

On the entrance-hall wall

You peer through the sugarcane windows

To view the cadaverous children

Choking and gagging in the swampy mud

And clawing at the dying sun
.

Covered by smoky funnel clouds

That cry on your black brick house

From tea to wine

All the time

Cutting clad crystal

In effervescent cultivation

Crawling up from pits of suicide contemplation

Where was Catatonia? What does it mean to “cut clad crystal”? Was “from tea to wine” a fancy way of saying “breakfast to dinner”? And, most important, who the hell was Aunt Laura? I didn't have an aunt Laura. Even if I did and she was dead, we didn't have an “entrance-hall wall” on which to display her remains.

Was Seguin sucking the creative spirit right out of me? What did this town, full of man-made replicas of nuts and animals, have to offer me? What did it mean that I'd wanted to kiss and touch Greg for so long, but that finally getting to had felt like nothing to me? I knew that something inside me was broken or defective. I didn't know who I was without my friends and my school and FX. I didn't know what role I played in this family or who I would be without my freedom.

I ran to my car after dinner and peeled out of the driveway. I drove past the strip malls, the Walmart, the fake nut; past the highway truck stop and farming-supply store and sewage-treatment plant. I drove until all the electric lights faded away, until it was just me and the moon and the road. I rolled the windows down and let in the wind. Out in the darkness I could hear the sound of toads and crickets and, somewhere, water. Soon I was entering New Braunfels. I didn't choose to drive there as much as gravity pulled me there. I thought I'd be able to locate the house unseen in the night. But as I drove down Max's street, he looked right into my eyes from the porch, watching me roll by at three miles an hour in my little blue car.

He sauntered over to my driver's-side window in unlaced Docs and a tight Guinness T-shirt. He leaned into the window
with a grin. I could see his barely-there Mohawk, like a three-inch-wide landing strip on top of his head. As I greeted him with an outstretched hand, his baby-faced smile disappeared.