Bad Kid (26 page)

It was quiet for a moment. And then my dad smiled at me.

“I don't understand why parents would love their kids less because of that,” he said, his lip trembling a bit. “Seems to me like it's the reason you have to love 'em even more.”

As we turned into the bookstore parking lot, I wished I hadn't made fatherhood so hard for my dad. I wished I hadn't tried to keep so many parts of myself a secret from him. And I wished I hadn't thrown out that greeting card.

That night, I walked into a house party in Seguin and immediately heard him.

“DUDE!”

Max stood at the opposite side of the apartment through a crowd of forty people. He rushed toward me and picked me up off the ground, hugging me for so long I had to say, “Max, you're hurting me.”

“David! Oh man, I've missed you,” he said, flashing his dimples and rubbing the top of my head. “My little Sequined Matador!”

His hair had grown in, and he was a bit stockier. He was still wearing his big black boots, but the tiny suspenders were gone. He introduced me to a petite, demure girl with pink bangs and oxblood boots.

“Max has told me so much about you,” she said, shaking my hand with the strength of a light breeze.

“This is Lori,” he beamed, handing me a rum and Coke. “She's my girlfriend.”

Max grabbed a six-pack of beer, and the three of us sat on the grass in the front yard. Max told me how his mom was doing and what his senior year had been like. He caught me up on his sisters and told me about the part-time job he'd gotten at a video store.

“How shitty has Seguin been?” he asked.

“Actually, it turned out okay,” I said, passing him another beer. “Once I found the right people it was nice, actually.”

“The right people make everything okay,” said Lori, grabbing Max's hand and looking at him intently, clearly in love, like she couldn't see past him. For a moment I thought I saw him blush, which I'd never seen before.

“How's New Braunfels?” I asked him.

“It's kind of lame there now. But I'm starting college in San Marcos soon.”

“Wait,” I said, “I'm starting college there too!”

“Oh, dude! We can party together!” yelled Max, toasting me with his can of Foster's and downing it in one giant slurp.

We caught up on music we loved, ranted about social injustices, laughed about our weird-ass parents, and complained about politicians and small towns and our minimum-wage jobs. We talked until 3 a.m. about whether our classes were near each other's and when I'd be able to visit his mom and how he wanted me to crash over at his place soon.

“It's gonna be awesome,” Max said as he hugged me good night. I held on to him a little too long, remembering how large he was and how his body always felt warmer than anyone else's, like it was on high heat. I'd forgotten the way he smelled and hadn't realized how much I'd missed it. As we let go of each other, I remembered something.

“Max! Remind me I still have your shirt.”

“My shirt?”

“The one you gave me when I puked all over myself the first night we met.”

“My big leprechaun shirt?” he exclaimed, grabbing me by the shoulders and grinning. “Awww, man! I missed that shirt.” He pulled me in and joyfully crushed me in a too-tight bear hug. “And I missed you too.”

“Come on, drunky,” said Sarah, smiling as she pulled him toward her car. “He doesn't know his own strength,” she whispered, winking at me as she led him away.

I started my car and pulled away a few minutes later. Twenty feet down the street, Max jumped in the middle of the road, flagging me down to stop. Sarah stood by her parked car, rolling her eyes and mouthing, “Sorry, David.”

Max gestured for me to roll down the window and leaned inside the car.

“Hey,” he mumbled, his drunken gaze slipping from my eyes to my shoulder as he spoke, “listen to this!”

He handed me a Memorex cassette. The case was covered in both of our handwriting.

“This one is my favorite. I still listen to it all the time.”

“Thanks, Max. You still have these?”

“You got my shirt in the breakup. And I got the tapes,” he said, resting his chin on the window ledge of the door. “Hey, man. Um, I just need to say something.”

“Max, you don't have to say—”

“Shhh,” he said, reaching down with his fumbling hand to hush my mouth but accidentally covering my entire face. “No, it's just . . . I'm sorry.”

“I am too, Max.”

“You?” he asked. “Why are you sorry?”

A car behind us honked as Sarah skipped into the road to grab Max.

“Baby, let's get you out of the road and home. You're drunk.”

“Okay, uh . . .” The rest of his sentence faded away as they walked back to Sarah's car.

As she stopped him from tripping over the curb and helped him into her car, I popped the tape into the jam box in the passenger seat. He waved good-bye with a huge grin as I pulled away, our favorite song thundering through my cheap, tinny speakers.

She tuned the radio 'til music was around us

A rushing calm around my heart I knew had found us

Some of the friends I'd made in Seguin were nice enough to invite me to hang out after prom. I was dateless and didn't actually attend. But they picked me up in a limo afterward. Because it was a special occasion I blew out my hair and put on a paisley tie. This is one of those moments during which I was overtaken by the feeling that I was supposed to be somewhere else, in spite of how much fun I was having. I think my hands nervously picking at my jeans and the far-off gaze out the limousine window say it all.

My Seguin friends called themselves the Freedom Club. Here we are with the Freedom Van.

I
was supposed to be in my art history class. I loved that class. I liked sitting in the stadium seats of that cold, dark room, looking at slides of famous works of art. It was almost Thanksgiving and we'd moved into pop art, my favorite period, full of romanticized representations of Coke bottles, comic-book panels, and vacuum cleaners, ordinary stuff that someone turned into “art” by placing it on a pedestal or under a glass box. I wanted to be there that day, shivering in the hyperactive air-conditioning, looking at a stack of soup cans that transcended themselves because someone loved them so much. I was supposed to be in that classroom, not standing in a black suit in the rain.

The minister finished his sermon and a few members of the family approached the casket, placing their hands on it or whispering to it, as if the dead person inside could hear them. I hadn't
expected so many people to be there, so many kids I hadn't seen in ages, wearing makeshift, not-quite-matching black suits and baby-doll dresses carefully tailored into tasteful funeral attire. Nose rings had been taken out, and Mohawks were combed over and gelled flat for the ceremony. Some of the kids I'd remembered didn't look like kids anymore. They'd gotten chubby, or cut their long hair, or had bags under their eyes, like they'd aged ten years in a little over one. A couple of girls I'd remembered in dog collars and fishnet gloves were now wearing sensible, knee-length skirts, sobbing over the tiny babies they held in their arms.

By the time the casket was lowered into the ground, we were all soaking wet, two hundred people beneath a slate-gray sky, looking like drowned rats. The ones who'd retained their goth/punk aesthetic post–high school looked especially pathetic, streaks of black tears and dripping hair dye in the rain, like those clammy kids in the crosswalk I'd seen years earlier. We paced through the mud toward the tent to pay our respects and greet the family. I got in line and made my way forward, wanting to be out of the rain and under the tent but not looking forward to hugging Ruth, not like this. As I got closer to her I started to think about all the things I wanted to say. I wanted to tell her how much I loved her son, how he saved me from being completely alone, how the times she'd let me into her home were so special to me. She was my summer mom.

I nodded to Max's sisters, whose faces looked gray and hard, like stones. Ruth looked exhausted too, but she was managing to put on a smile as each kid broke into tears and hugged her. She comforted each one of them, stuck in the role of mom even at her own son's funeral.

I told myself I wasn't going to break down or freak out. I was
going to be strong and mature. I was going to say something substantial and honest that was meaningful and true. As I faced her and smiled, she tilted her head to the side, her bottom lip quivering a bit. I threw my arms around her and we held each other for a moment.

“Hi, David,” she whispered, rubbing my back.

“Hi, Ruth. I'm sorry, I . . .” I stammered, suddenly at a loss for words. I always managed to say so much in the moments when I didn't mean to, but now I was coming up dry when it mattered.

“You, uh . . .” I stuttered, “you smell so good.”

That was what I said to her before she started to cry on my shoulder.

You smell good
.

We held each other for another moment, before the outside world around us interrupted our embrace. A line of a hundred people was waiting behind me. Ruth had to do this another hundred times, hopefully with people who could muster something more meaningful than complimenting her perfume.

“Thank you,” she said, taking my hands.

“Sorry,” I stammered. “I'm sorry, Ruth. I'm sorry . . .”

“I know,” she said, smiling and patting my cheek.

I walked through the mud back to my car, where I sat in the driver's seat and watched people leave the cemetery. Sean noticed me from the driver's seat of his brown truck and nodded solemnly, a gesture that, coming from him, felt like a tearful embrace. An hour later everyone had left and a small crew of men arrived to shovel dirt into the hole on top of Max's coffin. By the time they finished and left with the tent, it was a full-on rainstorm outside. I got out of my car and walked back across
the field to Max's grave, which now looked like a work site. Orange tape and wooden pegs in the ground surrounded the area. A few two-by-two-foot flats of soiled grass sat stacked in a small wheelbarrow beside two shovels that stuck up from the ground. Max was down there, somewhere underneath a small hill of mud. Alone.

“I'm sorry,” I said, and finally had the opportunity to put my feelings into words.

Fifteen minutes later I was driving down I-35, not knowing where to go. I drove around New Braunfels, past the places Max and had I spent time together, all of which felt empty and transformed without him. I drove to Seguin past the Primitive Baptist cemetery, thinking of all the stupid poetry I'd written there. I stared past the flower box into the window of our little country house, at my mother washing dishes, and knew I couldn't go inside. So I drove to San Antonio.

I pulled up at Greg's house and walked halfway up the sidewalk before I noticed the silence. There were no twinkling chimes to welcome me up to the front door. Behind me I noticed a
FOR SALE
sign sticking out of the grass. I walked behind the house to the office window, which had always had a broken lock. Inside the house was nothing. The electricity had been turned off. It felt like a tomb. I illuminated my way through with a Bic lighter. Absentmindedly I called Greg's name, as if he would pop out from the kitchen in a Morrissey shirt with a tray of defrosted egg-roll bites. I walked down the corridor to his room, which, of course, was empty. I stayed in the room and smoked for a while, lying in different spots on the floor where I approximated that my twin bed had been.

And then I drove, and drove, and drove . . .

Sylvia was surprised to see me. I was surprised that her phone number was listed, let alone still connected. She answered the door in a long Betty Boop T-shirt and jeans. Her brown hair was pulled back under a pastel headband. She had almost no makeup on. She looked prettier than I'd ever seen her. She welcomed me into her apartment, which was, strangely, in the same complex where I'd lived with my father.

“Girl, I always loved this complex,” she said, giving me a kiss on the cheek. “Reminds me of good times.”

Walking into the living room, I was greeted by a motley crew of small animals.

“Meet my children,” she grinned, pointing at each of the four dogs and cats as she listed their names. She poured me a glass of water and caught me up on the last year and a half of her life.

“Well, Minerva, I
was
doin' phone sex for a while but this creep kept callin', begging me to make him jerk off with chunky peanut butter. Ooh! That bitch would scream!” she sighed, lighting a cigarette off the stove. “So now I just do telemarketing. Which is a different kind of phone-torture.”

“What are all those?” I asked, noticing that her refrigerator was covered in magnets and calendars for PETA and the ASPCA.

“Oh girl, I'm a vegetarian now,” she said with a smirk. “Sorry if I ruined you on burgers.”

Around her apartment I noticed odd details: things that suggested responsibility. In the kitchen hung a big marked-up calendar. By the front door was a wall-mounted key-ring holder. In the hallway there was a little slotted shelf that said
MAIL
on it. Even the simple clock hanging by her patio door suggested something too pedestrian. Since when did Sylvia care about time? How could Sylvia possibly have anywhere to go?

We sat down on the couch and paused the
Friends
DVD she had been watching.

“You watch
Friends
?” I asked, surprised that she watched such a mainstream show.

“Girl, I just love me some Ross. I could eat that Jew's cookies!” she snickered, exhaling an endless plume of smoke. The idea of Sylvia liking a bumbling, uptight Jewish professional seemed out of sync with her usual tatted-up, angry poet type.

“Do you have a roommate, Sylvia?”

“Roommate?” she exclaimed. “Hell no, bitch. I'm a grown-ass woman with my own jobby-job, thank you very much.”

I looked around her apartment, and it was indeed her own: full of her own thrift-store furniture and stacks of fashion magazines and framed photos of friends. Her animals napped on every surface as we talked about Greg and Raven and Ray-Ray and the Bonham Exchange, remembering insane nights out, filling in the drug-induced blanks for each other as we went along.

“Guess what, Sylvia? I'm going to college in San Marcos now.”

“Bitch! College? That's so great,” she said, bouncing up and down on the couch like I'd just told her an eight ball was on the way. “Your mom must be so proud!”

“You know her. She's over the fucking moon.”

“Oh, I miss your mama. But truth be told, she is a talker. Dear Lord, she could keep a bitch on the phone for hours! I had to fake a kitchen fire once just to hang up.”

I chuckled to myself at how incredulous my mother would be.

“So you like your job?” I asked.

“Hell no! I'm gonna save up my money, buy some real nice
clothes, and get an internship working for a magazine in New York City. They won't pay shit, but I can shack up with a bunch of weirdos in the ass end of Brooklyn. I don't care if my bathtub's in the motherfuckin' kitchen. I can douche and boil ramen at the same time!” she snickered.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No, ma'am. Know why? 'Cause ain't no man good enough! I locked up the goodies until I get to the Big Apple. Cla-clink!” she cackled, miming a chastity belt locking between her legs and throwing the invisible key over her shoulder. “What about you, Minerva?”

“No. Um, I'm not seeing anyone.”

“Oh, stick-in-the-mud, are you still livin' like a nun? What about that big old skinhead, girl? Have you knocked boots with Mr. Clean or what?”

I wanted to tell her where I'd just come from. But nothing came out.

“Hey, you,” she said, touching my hand, “what's wrong?”

“Well,” I paused, worried that once I started, I wouldn't be able to stop. “A week ago, Max was driving alone at night along the highway. They're not sure what happened, but . . . He lost control of the car and flipped it. It was late, so he didn't hit any other cars, but he crashed upside down in the emergency lane. They think . . . They think he hung upside down like that for a while, suspended by the seatbelt. Maybe he was unconscious for part of it, maybe not. He eventually freed himself and barged the door open, but . . .”

“It's okay,” Sylvia said, gripping my hand tighter as the tears came.

“But he fell out of the car just as another car was passing and
it . . . hit him. They say he died instantly, that he didn't feel any pain. But I don't know how long he was in there. How long was he alone and conscious? I keep thinking about how scared he must have been, waking up like that. And was his body hurt? Was something broken or cut before that? Was he bleeding? Did he call out for someone? Was he scared?”

I covered my face in my hands and kept talking, my mouth like a gaping wound now, pouring everything out in a way I wanted to stop but couldn't.

“I was just at the funeral surrounded by all these people, all his friends. Some of them were people I used to know. I thought it would make me feel better, but without him there I felt like . . . no one. Like I didn't know any of those people. And I thought when I saw them or hugged his mom that I would . . . feel something. Like I would feel . . . him. Like a presence or a spirit or something.”

The sounds of the words I was saying reverberated back at me and pushed out more tears and spit and mucus. I felt messy and ugly and full of imperfections. I wanted to shut up, to be mute, to simply disappear. But I couldn't.

“I started to panic because I knew Max really wasn't there. So I went to his grave later and said all this stuff to him. Stuff I'd meant to say but was either too scared or lazy or dumb to have said before. And I waited, thinking he would . . . But . . . I couldn't . . . I couldn't feel him, Sylvia. You know? I had not even just a little sense that he was there, because he's gone. Not gone the way you've been gone or Greg is gone, but really gone. I'd just seen him a few months ago and we were going to be friends. But our classes were on different days and I met other new people and he was dating this nice girl and we . . . We just . . .”

I looked through my fingers at the coffee table, noticing the interlocking rings of drinking-glass stains in the wood.

“Me and him . . . We were gonna be friends again.”

The silence between us was cut by a sound, a bubbly, rumbling hum. I uncovered my face and looked at Sylvia, who was holding, as if it had materialized from thin air, the biggest water bong I'd ever seen. It was two feet long and flesh-colored, streaked with small pink lines. She held it by its base, a pair of darkened lavender orbs full of percolating water. She drew her lips away from the dark-pink, spherical mouthpiece atop the chamber shaft.

Sylvia was smoking weed from the hollow mold of a two-foot-long, erect penis.

“Bitch, that is the saddest shit I ever heard,” she sobbed, blowing out a massive cloud of smoke as I looked on, shocked out of my state by her magically appearing dong-bong.

“What?” she asked, seeing the appalled expression on my face.

“What the fuck is that?”

“Oh. It's just a little purple haze,” she said, handing me the huge dick. I paused with it in my arms and shot her a look of concern, doubting the bowl's contents.

“Okay, Minerva,” she blushed, “you got me. I put a little catnip in there too. Just tryin' somethin' new.”