Blazed (4 page)

I don't even hesitate.

I run right at him and slam him into the wall.

This pussy doesn't even know what to do.

I punch him. And I punch him again. And then I grab his neck and slam his head against the wall before the gym teacher pulls me off.

A few minutes later, I'm in the principal's office. Again. I don't feel bad or sorry. I feel nothing except worry for my mother. All alone at the house. Full of questions. With a busted hand. Probably drinking to numb out all the guilt and hate that's overwhelming her and making her panic, because she hates to feel anything other than pity and sorrow.

One of the secretaries comes into the office and sets my backpack on the desk.

Before she leaves, she glares at me and shakes her head all disapprovingly.

“Yeah?” I snort. “What?”

“It's a shame to see such a bright kid behaving like this.”

“Right. Sticking up for myself, and sticking up for my mother. Putting asshole bullies in their place. It's awful.”

“Such a filthy mouth.”

“Then stop talking to me,” I go. “Leave me alone.”

She leaves the room, and while I wait for the principal, I dig into my backpack for
The Human War
.

I'm reading it for the third time this month.

I love Noah Cicero's writing. It's brutally honest and funny, and a lot of it is weird. His style, too, especially in this book, is incredible, and the pacing is brilliant.

Pacing is everything to me when I'm reading a book or a poem.

It has to flow and move and reflect the nature of the characters the author invented.

This book does all of that.

Of all the authors in the forefront of the Alt Lit community, he's my favorite. Tao Lin is probably my second favorite.

The principal finally walks in. Dude's a jerkoff.

Fucking pilgrim scum jerk.

He's bald in the center of his head, with thick brown hair wrapping from side to side.

I think he's nailing the secretary that was just in here. I saw his hand on her ass in the parking lot one day while I was waiting for my mother to pick me up. She was an hour late and showed up in her bathrobe and a pair of sunglasses with a thermos full of wine and a cigarette between her lips, blasting the Talking Heads. I drove us home. I've been driving for two years now.

Plus, he's always creeping and lurking on the girls who attend this school. He stares at their asses when they walk by him in the hallway. And he puts his arms around them
when he's talking to them to stare down their unbuttoned blouses. They're supposed to be buttoned all the way to the neck, but I've never heard about any of them getting detention for that particular uniform “modification.”

Also, he sucks up to the jocks.

Those assholes never get into trouble, even though they terrorize kids.

And they openly cheat on tests.

And they never turn in their homework on time.

And they're super bastards to most of these girls.

It's so rude and annoying.

And they never get shit from this prick.

Every day I see him bro-ing down with them. Cracking jokes with them. High-fiving them and calling them by their last names to address them.

This place is so bullshit.

Leaning back in his chair and crossing his legs, he says, “What would you do if you were me?”

“Really?”

“Yes, Mr. Miles.”

“I'd shave the hair I got left, man. Have some respect for yourself.”

His face gets red. He scowls. But it's such a joke. I don't get intimidated. He should know better. I'd fight him if he wanted to fight me.

“Kids like you, privileged, smart-ass rich kids like you . . .”

“What about it?” Pause. “Sir,” I say, smirking.

“You're just pests. I've seen so many bastard kids like you come through this school and never amount to anything.”

“Good story, bro,” I say.

“You'll leave this school one day. You will. And then you'll drop out of college and live off your trust fund until you've blown through all of it and you and your drunk mother have to move into some shitty apartment. You'll never see the world, Mr. Miles. You'll never have a good life, and that's a shame because you are one of the brightest kids I've seen walk through these prestigious doors.”

Images of me jumping over his overpriced desk and landing a haymaker on this jerk before putting him in a Boston crab smash through my head.

He's gonna pay for bringing my mother into this.

“I've heard all of this before,” I tell him. “Mostly from you.”

“I know you have. But obviously, none of it's gotten through to you. It's pathetic. I've seen your path play out before with other students. It's not pretty. It's a path that leads to nowhere.”

The fact that he can't rattle me infuriates him. He's seething. Men like this, who spent their childhood and teenage years, all the way through college, desperately trying to be liked and accepted by the popular kids but never were, never even got a fucking sniff from those assholes,
they use any kind of power they acquire later in life to try and right all the slights and the wrongs they've carried around for so long.

It's why he coddles those jocks.

It's why he gets close to the pretty girls who walk down these “prestigious” hallways.

And it's why he hates me.

Because I'm handsome enough to have any of these girls.

Because I'm gifted enough.

I could have friends in every single social circle in this school if I wanted them, because me and my mother are very well off.

Coming from money in a place like this gives you automatic popularity and acceptance if you care about those kinds of things, but I don't.

It's phony.

Nothing genuine can ever be cultivated under those circumstances, and I'm fine with this.

I've fucking chosen this route.

I'll never compromise a thing I love in order to be liked by anyone else.

Shrugging now, I snort. “And what you do in life . . .”

“What about it, Mr. Miles?”

“It's nothing. You're a principal. You've never done a thing to influence culture. Nobody knows who you are outside of Joliet, so spare me your crystal-ball reading, man. You're old and you've never seen the world.”

Slamming his fist against the desk, he yells, “I'm done with you!”

“Great.”

“No wonder your mother is a drunk. I'd drink like that too if I had to deal with you every day.”

I stay calm. As much as I wanna destroy this man's ugly face and piss on his cheap Sears suit, I take a deep breath and look him dead in the eyes. “All the girls who go to school here make fun of you. How do you like that?”

“I don't care.”

“How does it feel to know that the second you turn your back, these rich girls and these rich boys are pointing at you and laughing and calling you names?”

“Enough!”

He presses a button on his phone and orders that same secretary back into the room.

“My mother was more successful by the age of twenty than you've been your entire life,” I tell him. “You know nothing about her. My mother is better than you.”

The principal looks over my shoulder and at the secretary. “Any word?”

“No.”

His eyes jump back to me. “Your mother isn't answering her phone, either.”

“I've left five voice mails,” the secretary says.

The principal smirks again. “Not even she wants to deal with you, Mr. Miles. That leaves nobody. You have no one.”

My hands ball into fists.

“Please escort this violent student to detention.”

The tension releases from my hands. “Cool.”

“That will be your classroom for the remaining seven days of school. You'll check in with me upon your arrival to the building every morning, and I'll bring you all of your reading assignments and homework for the day.”

“Works for me.”

“When your mother does come to pick you up at the end of classes today, I'll explain everything to her and we'll begin to explore other schooling options for you next year, because this isn't going to work.”

“Whatever.”

“The path you've chosen, Mr. Miles, is a very poor one, and often ends on an assembly line somewhere or behind the cash register at a hardware store.”

I stand up.

“Is that all?” I ask. Another pause. “Sir.”

“I feel sorry for you.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I was about to say the same thing to you, dude.”

INSTEAD OF WORKING ON THE
three-hundred-word essay about the Trail of Tears the principal demanded I write before the end of the day, I read two of the short stories—“She Kills Love” and “The Whore”—from James Morgan's book
Where the Mean Girls Are
, then I slam some words into my writing notebook.

I just want this day to end.

About a half an hour before the final bell, I crib the assignment. I write five hundred words instead of three. And then I get excused to go to the bathroom. While I'm in there, I crush an Oxy on the back of a toilet and snort it up with a ten-dollar bill that was left over from the cab ride to school this morning.

There's this line at the end of “She Kills Love” that is stuck in my head. It's a line that Morgan uses in a lot of his stories.

This is the game that moves as you play . . .

And me, I've got this incredibly intense feeling that everything in my world is about to begin moving quickly and violently and there ain't nothing I can do to stop it or even slow it down.

I'm not exactly sure why I've got this feeling, but I think it has something to do with my mother.

MY MOTHER DOESN'T PICK ME
up. She doesn't answer her phone when I call, either. This is strange. My mother has never been late picking me up on a day I have a music lesson, no matter how bombed she is. On lesson days, she's there. Sometimes she's even early.

Dread runs through me as I sit on the school steps and wait. This sinking is just leveling me.

I'm trying to hold on to the thought that maybe she's sleeping. Maybe she was so hung over, so sick and sore, she took a couple of Xanax and a Vicodin and washed them down with whiskey, because the pain and the memory loss were finally too gnarly for her to deal with.

It's tough to believe, though.

She's just too darn committed to me and music and art.

Finally, after an hour, I walk home.

It's probably a thirty-minute walk. I put my earphones in and crank some RZA. I should be halfway through my piano lesson right now. Instead, like ten minutes into my walk, I take my backpack off and pull my camcorder out. There's this piece I've been thinking out for weeks, and I'm pretty sure I've got it down now.

Holding the camera above me, I hit the record button and go for it. . . .

“Her name was Emma and her hair was black like the night and she rode a sick yellow bike with a wood basket and two Nirvana stickers on it . . . It snowed for a month straight and with nothing to do, she dug an old photo book out of her closet . . . she started crying before she'd even opened it . . . there was a time when she had everything she'd ever dreamed of, yet she never stopped to enjoy a single moment of it, she never even thought to think this is it, this is my dream come true . . . the photos tortured her and broke her heart all over again . . . She vowed to never look at them again, but when she tried to close the book, she couldn't and the pain stung like a million bees because there she was, the failure she'd come to accept . . . That spring I saw her running down this dirt road in a blue dress . . . Her hair blew in the wind and her body had all grown up . . . The year before I'd asked her for a slow dance at the community center's annual Halloween party . . . I was dressed as the Karate Kid and she was dressed like Snow White . . . The song I asked her to dance to was “Skinny Love” by Bon Iver . . . I'll love that song long after the day I die . . . She declined because she already had a man . . . He wasn't there that night, though . . . He'd been gone for a while, though, even if she didn't care to count the days as I had . . . Someday, we'll all be a thousand years older than we are now and I'm not sure we'll be any wiser when it comes to the heart and when it comes to love . . . This is the story that never changes . . . You mark my words on that . . . A week ago I played a pickup game of basketball and scored twenty-three points . . . Afterward, I jacked off in the park's bathroom and I wrote her name on the stall with my come . . . It's not often that you think about one person so kindly for so long, it's not often that
you don't take the memories for granted the way you had the person . . . I once dreamt of driving through El Paso and becoming a drug dealer, it wasn't so bad . . . I need New York like I need a blow job . . . I need San Francisco like I need Oxy . . . the dress she wore that day when she ran down the road was handmade by her mother . . . her mother made all her clothes because they couldn't afford to go shopping for anything new, in fact the last new thing she'd bought was an MC5 T-shirt because they were her favorite and she'd dreamt about being in their band every night for three weeks straight . . . In the end, Emma is just this girl, she's a crush that won't go away . . . And in the end, I'm just a boy, a boy who wishes he could've shoveled that snow for her . . . One day I'll have someone to cook pancakes and sausage for, one day I'll get my slow dance . . . Next spring I'm going to Taipei cos Tao Lin wrote about going there in one of his books . . . Next winter I'm gonna head to the Marshall Islands and go scuba diving through the remains of all those World War Two battleships . . . Tomorrow I'll eat ice cream for breakfast, then go back to bed; the next day, I'll Gmail chat with a stranger I met on Facebook and make her a shirt, buy her a poster, maybe send her some music . . . It's been a long time since I've seen a bluebird fly . . . The next time I see Emma running, I don't think I'll chase her, I think it's better if Emma just gets away. . . .”