Bad Kid (6 page)

The problem with dumping Patty myself was that I couldn't take the risk that it might make me look gay. I'd have to find a
way to make
her
break up with
me
. I started by feigning interest in other girls at school.

“Patty! Look at Jill's blouse. Isn't it pretty? She's wearing her hair in a braid today!”

You know. The way boys noticed girls.

But Patty proved hard to shake. Everywhere I looked, there was her face—a face that was, increasingly often, diving in toward mine with parted lips and a whipping, pink tongue, like the giant plant in
Little Shop of Horrors
. I didn't understand why the prospect of kissing her scared me so deeply. I'd seen lots of people kiss on TV, in films,
and
in real life. People were kissing all the time at school. But no one made it look the way Greg Brooks did. In the parking lot I'd seen him kissing Jill, their lips mashing against each other's as their soft, pink tongues darted in and out. I would watch them and try to imagine kissing Patty with that kind of dexterity. But before I knew it, I was imagining that I was Jill being kissed by Greg.

Shortly before spring break I was sitting in the cafeteria beside Patty with a few other friends when I felt something on my crotch. I looked down to see Patty's pasty meat-paw between my legs.

“Patty,” I whispered, trying not to make a scene.

“It's okay, David,” she whispered, petting her crucifix with her free hand. “I've been praying about this. And God thinks it's okay.”

I'd reached my breaking point. It was time to step things up. That night, I came up with the perfect plan.

A few days later at lunch, I sat next to Patty as she brushed her hair. Once finished, she laid the chunky purple brush down
on the table. I picked it up and began gathering a clump of hair from the bristles.

“David, what are you doing with my hair?” she asked with a confused half smile.

“Oh, nothing,” I said, feigning surprise at being caught. “I just want a little piece of you with me all the time.” I flashed her a creepy smile and stared too hard into her eyes.

“Oh,” she stammered. “That's . . . nice.”

“I have to go the bathroom,” I said, knocking a large book out of my backpack and onto the ground as I walked away.

“You dropped something,” I heard Patty say as I left, but I pretended I didn't.

The book Patty picked up was
The Complete Book of Spells, Ceremonies and Magic
, a thick purple tome full of tarot advice, astrological charts, and exorcism how-tos. I'd taken it from my mother's bookshelf, where it lived between Stephen King's
Cujo
and a forensics hardcover called
Explorations in Criminal Psychopathology
. The book was fairly harmless, but I hoped that once Patty found what was hidden in the front cover, she'd be running for her life, clutching her little necklace all the way.

A few minutes later I returned to find the table vacated, save for my witchcraft book, which was full of voodoo-doll sketches and a week's worth of Patty's stray hairs.

That afternoon, Patty's very timid mother called me at home when my mom was at work.

“I'm sorry to say that, um,” she gulped, her voice withering at the other end of the line, “and I'm sorry if this is upsetting, but Patty can't . . . Well . . .”

“Go ahead, Mrs. Marks,” I said calmly, trying not to laugh. As perverse as it sounds, I got a certain thrill in being dumped by a forty-two-year-old woman at the age of fourteen.

“Well, Patty would not like to see you anymore, David.”

“Oh, really,” I replied, trying to sound heartbroken.

“Alright, now. I have to go,” she said as Patty whispered something in the background. “You take care.”

Mrs. Marks hung up, and the line went dead. As the dial tone hummed in my ear, I took a deep breath, feeling accomplished. I was finally free. And in the silence of my bedroom I was alone. As this new reality struck me, so did the dread of how lonely I'd been before Patty came along. And for just a second, as badly as I'd wanted to be Patty-less a few hours earlier, I wondered if her serpentine tongue lashing at my face was really such a bad thing after all. This wasn't a new reality—it was a step back into an old one.

Without a girlfriend, whatever self-delusion of heterosexuality I'd achieved was gone. After a week of solitude all my fears came back, stronger than before: fear of God, fear of my family, fear of my peers, and fear of AIDS. I spent that spring break by myself. As other kids my age went to the beach or movie theater, I sat in my room, masturbating to the underwear section of a Sears catalog. Once, afterward, I thought I'd gotten sperm in a paper cut on my finger. This sent me into a tailspin—I worried that my body wouldn't realize that it was
my
sperm. If it mistook the semen as another male's, my body would know I was gay and instantaneously manifest HIV in my blood, because any gay sex act
must
surely lead to AIDS.

These thought circles were exhausting. My ever-present manifesto was starting to feel less like protection and more like
a curse, guiding me through every false smile, nervous glance, and fearful retreat. Even my sleep was fraught with tension, each dream plagued by faceless aggressors, drowning deaths, and cartoon snakes that screamed at me with the voice of God, my father, or Chris Wolfe.

A week before the end of freshman year I woke up in the middle of the night covered in sweat. I'd been dreaming my recurring balloon dream in which I rose into the sky, screaming, knowing that the more I struggled, the higher and faster I'd rise toward the ozone, where I'd burn up. I walked down the hall into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet for an aspirin. I swallowed it with water from the tap and started to read the “caution” label on the bottle. Then I read a different bottle's label, then another, and another.

“Honey.” I turned to see my bed-headed mother squinting in her terry cloth robe. “David, you've been in here forever. Are you okay?”

“Yeah, Mom,” I said, turning off the faucet. “Just a headache.”

I lay awake the rest of that night, considering my options, projecting myself into the future, imagining the “what-ifs.” Suicide would be forever, but so would being alone. There was no seductive drama to killing myself anymore. It was simply a practical response to my life, the natural antidote to the dull gray thudding in my brain, the only way to undo the realization of what I was becoming.

I stumbled through school that Monday, the last week before summer break. In the locker room I was too tired to notice or care about any of the wet, sinewy boys' bodies around me. In spite of being totally exhausted, I ran laps for forty-five minutes.
I didn't think to fake a stomach cramp or the flu. Gym class was what occupied the 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. section of my daily list of activities. And as long as I honored my manifesto and adhered to the guidelines I'd set for myself, things would be fine. They had to be.

As I stood up from the locker-room bench, my head began to swim. I could feel my heart beating in my temples. Violet dots danced across my field of vision. I braced myself against the wall and carefully walked past the toned torsos of Ethan Gray, Bobby Johnson, and Jason Dermot, trying my best not to puke on their broad, athletic feet. In the bathroom stall at the back of the locker room, I vomited as quietly as I could, not wanting to be the possibly-gay weirdo who was
also
bulimic.

In the gymnasium I slogged up the bleachers toward Greg, who reclined casually while listening to his Discman.

“Hey. David. You okay?”

“I'm fine,” I said, not entirely sure if I was hallucinating Greg's voice. “Just feeling a little sick,” I added, looking into my bag to avoid eye contact.

“You
look
sick. Why did you even run today?”

“I had to,” I said, too exhausted to fully absorb that he was talking to me. “I don't have a doctor's note.”

“A note?” he asked with a smirk. “What do you mean?”

“Like a note that excuses you from participating in PE.”

“You don't need a note,” he smiled, flipping his bangs out of his eyes. “Nerd.”

The way Greg called me
nerd
was sweet, as if the word's rightful home had always been on his lips.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “I don't need a note?”

“No. You just . . . sit out.”

I repeated it slowly, like someone who didn't speak English.

“Sit . . . out . . . ?”

“Yeah. You show up. You sit here. And you wait for fifty minutes.”

“What?” I asked. This simple and obvious possibility blew my mind. Greg howled with laughter and slapped my shoulder.

“You thought . . . all this time that . . . you
had
to do gym class!”

I started to laugh with him, but not the way I usually did with kids who mocked me or adults whose jokes I didn't understand. It wasn't fake laughter intended to let me fit in or save face. It was chest-filling, gut-busting, very loud laughter.

“Hey!” Coach Allen boomed at us from below, “Quiet! You got five more minutes!”

“David,” Greg whispered, “another part of ‘sitting out' is never looking like you're enjoying yourself. It's key!”

Suddenly it all made sense: Greg's stoic lack of expression, his bored silence, and, most important, his yearlong lack of participation in gym class. No undisclosed disability or top-secret physician's note was required to sit out. All it took to not do it was
not doing it
. I thought back on my entire freshman year: all the push-ups and jumping jacks, and the hundreds of miles run on that blacktop track, all because I assumed I had to. How much time did I waste playing volleyball in those ill-fitting polyester shorts? And how many afternoons could I have spent laughing, albeit quietly, with Greg Brooks in the bleachers?

In the hallway as we left class, a shaft of sunlight hit Greg's handsome face, turning his bronzed hair platinum as he swept it off his forehead. Looking at him made me feel like a shrunken, gray-skinned zombie.

“See you tomorrow!” he yelled, swinging his backpack over his shoulder. “If you don't change out, let's hang out in gym tomorrow.”

Waving good-bye, I knew perfectly well I would never change out for gym class again.

G
reg and I spent the last week of our freshman year getting to know each other in gym class. We also spent a fair amount of time getting yelled at by Coach Allen for laughing. Coach was so mad by Friday that he made us both change out and run on the last day of school. Greg and I completed our laps side by side, chuckling together as he cursed me for ruining an otherwise perfect record of nonparticipation.

“I hate you so much,” he snickered, panting as he picked at the crotch of his gym shorts. “These shorts blow chunks.”

“Now you know,” I laughed, trying not to look directly at his face in the blinding sunlight for too long.

“Well, I understand why you're so skinny now,” Greg moaned, wiping sweat from his brow. I chuckled lightly, trying not to seem excited that Greg had noticed my body changing over the last school year.

After class, we exchanged phone numbers and agreed to hang out that summer. At home that first day off from school, I waited for Greg's call, but nothing. A week later I still hadn't heard from him, and I was starting to feel crazy. I would've clasped my hands and knelt by my bed had I not decided a few weeks back that prayer was a racket. I figured that if God was the kind of architect who would make me fret and suffer that much over his own faulty design, I'd rather not work with him (if he was even there at all).

Although I had Greg's number, I was afraid to be the first one to call. I had to play it cool and wait it out. But after another Greg-less week passed, I was crushed. I was also as pale as a ghost from all the hours spent indoors staring at the telephone.

And then the phone rang.

“Hello,” I answered, my voice quivering at the possibility.

“Hey, it's Greg,” he said as I hopped up and down as quietly as I could. It turned out that Greg's family's four-day summer trip to visit his great-aunt had become an extended stay when she fell down a flight of stairs. They had only just gotten home. I felt bad that Greg's aunt had gotten busted up, but I could've cared less as the following question flowed from the receiver into my ear.

“You wanna stay over tonight?”

I hesitated—partly out of fear, but I was also executing a favorite courting ritual of my mother's.

“Never seem desperate,” she'd remind me while staring at the phone for three whole rings before answering.

“Hello?” Greg asked. “Are you there, David?”

“Sure,” I said, staring at the Saturday-night shows I'd circled in the TV guide. “I don't
think
I have any plans.”

Two hours later I was in the bathroom, trying to cover a massive nose zit with flesh-tone Clearasil, a product supposedly designed for Caucasian humans, in spite of its peachy-orange hue. After several attempts, my schnoz still looked like a tiny, radioactive tangerine. No matter how thinly I laid the Clearasil on, I still had a huge orange dot in the center of my face. A half hour into washing and reapplying the stuff, my mother popped her head in the doorway.

“David, I . . . Oh, honey. Your face looks like a Twister mat,” she sighed. “What's going on with your makeup?”

“Mom, it's not makeup!”

“You know your mother wouldn't mind if you wore makeup,” she chirped, styling her hair in the mirror. “Some men live their whole lives as ladies because . . .”

“Mom! I'm not a lady. I'm just trying to cover my zits, okay?”

“Honey, try this Oil of Olay instead,” she said, pulling a small tan tube from her purse. “Your face looks like you were drinking a glass of Tang and your mouth missed the glass.”

“I don't want your makeup, Mom. It's for women. This Clearasil is bisexual.”

“David,” she giggled, “it's actually called
unisex
, meaning both men and women can . . .”

“I know, Mom! Just leave and go to Mike's already!”

My mom had started dating Mike a few months earlier. He lived in Seguin, a small town forty-five minutes away, where she was going to visit him for the first time. In the mirror over my shoulder she put on lip gloss, muttering as she hiked up her brassiere. My mom had always been self-conscious about her ample cleavage.

“Honey, do I look like a shameless hussy?”

“Mom,” I said to her reflection, “stop worrying.”

“Well, I'm nervous about meeting Mike's kids tonight,” she said, staring at her reflection and shrugging, as if to say,
I guess this is the best we can do
,
old gal
. “You would tell your mother if this top made me look like Dolly Parton, wouldn't you?”

“Mom, you look great,” I said, rubbing her shoulder. “Besides, where are you supposed to hide those things?”

“You turd!” she yelled, laughing herself to the front door. “Your mother should be ashamed of you.”

As she walked out, I yelled, “Good luck on your date, Mom!”

From the stairwell on the other side of the door she absentmindedly replied, “You too, honey.”

An hour later I left our apartment complex and began my hike to Greg's. As I walked down Harry Wurzbach Road in the humid sunset, the neighborhood changed. The houses got nicer, the businesses got fancier; gas stations were replaced by high-end craft stores and dress shops. I was entering the ritzier part of San Antonio, near Randolph Air Force Base.

Twenty minutes later I arrived, double-checking the address Greg had written on a pack of gum in gym class. It was a newer house painted a soft eggshell with pale gray trim; the sidewalk was lined with tiny electric candles. The trees on either side of me whispered with the sound of tinkling metal chimes. I stood at the large, frosted glass door and rang the bell. A few moments later Greg's mother appeared, wearing pink-framed glasses and a powder-blue top; a long blond braid rested on her shoulder.

“Hello, dear. I'm Georgia, Greg's mother,” she said, wrapping her arms around me.

“Oh . . . hello, Mrs. Brooks,” I stammered, ensconced in the smell of roses and cinnamon.

“Welcome,” she said with warm familiarity. “Let me show you our home.”

“Okay!” I beamed, feeling like an orphan offered shelter on a cold Christmas Eve.

Georgia's floor-length skirt made it seem like she was floating through the house, a stream of pastel gossamer trailing behind her. The floors were covered in Spanish tiles and the kitchen glowed with stainless-steel appliances. The den was furnished with a plush, overstuffed couch and love seat. Georgia slid open the patio door to reveal a crystal-blue, forty-foot swimming pool glistening in the moonlight. Tiki torches softly blazed around the yard and bamboo chimes sang from the surrounding trees. It was so much more than my mom and I had ever had, like my favorite
Architectural Digest
homes come to life.

“We have extra trunks if you want to go for a swim sometime this summer,” she said. Torchlight reflected off the pool's surface and danced across her face. Her earrings shimmered as a faint breeze lifted the pastel silk draping of her sleeves. She was Glinda the Good Witch, come to life as someone's mom.

In the kitchen, she poured me sparkling water and gestured to a slightly cracked door off the foyer. “Greg is just down that hall.”

I picked up my bag and walked toward the door, saying, “Thanks for having me, ma'am.”

“Call me Georgia, honey.”

As I raised my hand to the doorknob, it crept open on its own, creaking like a horror-film door behind which gruesome discoveries awaited. I looked back at Georgia at the end of her kitchen, suddenly so far away.

“The house isn't like this once you're down that hallway,” she said, bidding me an ominous adieu. “That's the boys' wing.”

I could've sworn I heard a thunderclap as I peered down the darkened hallway ahead.

“Hello?” No one answered. I looked over my shoulder, asking, “Georgia, does Greg . . .” But, like magic, she had vanished.

The hallway seemed endless, stretching out ahead of me like the gaping maw of death. As I crept forward, a din of clashing sounds grew louder: car crashes, screaming women, laser guns, electric guitars, like the sound of several thousand televisions on at the same time.

“Greg? Where are you?”

A thudding boom echoed from the recesses of the blackness as a dim shaft of light broke through the passage ahead. A stocky, muscle-bound man with clenched fists appeared. He was covered in a sheen of sweat, wearing nothing but tiny black shorts.

“Who are you?” he barked.

“Uh, I'm . . . uh . . . I'm David.” I held up my duffel bag in front of me, like it was proof that I was a welcome guest in this house of horrors.

“Greg! Greg! Greg!” he yelled repeatedly, while staring directly into my eyes. I struggled to maintain eye contact as I remembered my locker-room mantra.

Don't look down. Don't look down. Don't look down
.

Greg appeared from a door across the hall, wearing sweatpants and a blue T-shirt.

“Jesus, Greg,” the boy barked. “I've been yelling for an hour, dick-slice.”

“When
aren't
you yelling, assface?” Greg sneered back.

“Bite me. Is this is your friend, fucktard?”

“No, Johnny. It's a deranged murderer. Of course it's my friend, you idiot.”

Suddenly, Johnny thrust Greg down into a headlock. “Say it,” he yelled, squashing Greg's neck as he flexed his gigantic bicep beneath his jaw. “Say, ‘My name is Greg and I'm a — homo who loves noogies!'”

“This . . . is . . . my . . . brother . . . Johnny,” Greg wheezed as his brother rubbed two knuckles back and forth on top of his head “He's . . . a . . . dick.”

Maintaining his grip around Greg's neck, Johnny outstretched his free hand and flashed me a crooked smile. “So you're friends with Greg, my little sister?” he asked, shaking my hand.

“Sure,” I whimpered.

“Nice meeting ya, Dave,” grunted Johnny as he released Greg. “Don't let my brother give you a BJ after you fall asleep.”

“Sure thing!” I instinctively replied, like I'd just been given a polite reminder to wiggle the handle when I flushed. As Johnny stomped back to his room, a door behind me swung open.

“Who are you?” asked a redheaded boy in his early twenties.

Greg choked out an introduction. “This . . . is my brother Adam.”

“Hi Adam. I'm David. Nice to . . .”

Before I could finish, another door opened behind me. An adolescent boy with shaggy brown hair leaned into the hall, clutching a Swatch phone against his chest.

“Adam, shut the fuck . . . Oh . . .” he paused, noticing me, “who are you?”

Before I could answer, Adam interrupted, “Shut up, Charlie! I'm trying to study!”

“You're too stupid to study, dickweed!”

“I'm not the one making the noise, shit-for-brains!”

Their screaming match continued a foot and a half from my face until Georgia appeared down the hall, carrying a tray. “Calm down, boys,” she delicately reprimanded, offering me a carefully arranged platter of Pizza Pockets. “I thought you'd like some snacks.” She looked down at Greg hacking on the floor with tears streaming down his face. “Oh, you boys,” she smiled, patting my cheek. “It's a kind of hell down here, David. Have fun.”

Greg's bedroom was like an oasis in the midst of a nightmare: a clean, well-lit space with two twin beds and a huge window facing the front yard. Across one of the walls was a poster for a band called Erasure.

“David, how have you NOT heard of them?” Greg said, leaping from one bed to the other like a deranged ballerino. He tore through a box of cassettes on the floor. “You haven't heard ‘A Little Respect'?” He popped the tape into a boom box and tossed me the cassette case. “They're the best. Check out the cover.” Greg bounced onto the bed beside me, propping his chin up on his palms as he began to explain why he loved Erasure. I tried to keep my eyes focused on the lyric sheet as his body leaned against mine. No friend had ever been so close to me on a bed before, or anywhere else, for that matter.

“That's my favorite song!” Greg yelped, pointing his finger at the liner notes in my lap, a mere four inches from my crotch. I instinctively stood up from the bed.

“Your room is awesome!” I said, stretching and yawning to convey the message,
I'm not freaked out by your jabbing at my penis. I'm just feeling really sleepy all of a sudden and need to wake up
.

Greg looked at me quizzically. “Um, do you want to change or something?”

“Uh, sure!” I said, opening my duffel bag and taking out my clothes: two pairs of khaki pants, three polo shirts, two pairs of boxer briefs, and white knee-length socks.

“Are you staying over or moving in?” Greg chuckled, picking at my clothes as if they were evidence from a crime scene. “We're gonna watch a movie, not go to church.”

He brushed past me to his closet and opened the doors. “You can borrow something,” he said, tossing me a pair of sweatpants and a
Max Headroom
T-shirt.

“Well?” he said, staring at me expectantly. “Are you gonna change?”

“Here?” I asked, not wanting to be naked or partially naked in front of anyone, anywhere, ever. “You want me to change
here
?”

“No, David. I was thinking you'd change in the kitchen.”

“The kitchen?” I asked. “You want me to change in the kitchen?”

“I'm joking, weirdo,” he said, fiddling with his cassettes. “Change here. Duh.”

I began to disrobe at a snail's pace, reminding myself that normal boys changed in front of one another. I tried to jump out of my pants quickly as Greg glanced away from me, but I snagged my right ankle in the cuff. Balancing on one leg like a flamingo, I started to hop to keep from falling over. But it was too late. I face-planted onto the bed, squirming, my legs bound together at the knees by my pants.