Cycler (3 page)

I close the book and look up at my calendar. I now have one hundred and twenty-six days to get Tommy Knutson to ask me to the prom. That may sound like a long time to you, but I don’t even have a strategy yet. I pick up Mom’s book again. It’s a place to start, right?

March 14

Jack

Let me tell you something about Jill
. The girl’s life is a friggin’ fairy tale. I swear she wakes up to the sound of woodland creatures whistling a happy tune at her window. Oh, but it’s not all sunshine and roses, right? “Boo friggin’ hoo, Steven Price asked me to the prom when I really really really want to go with Tommy Knutsack.”

Well, listen up, Little Jilly Wets-her-pants, when your biggest problem is conning some lazy-eyed schmuckwit into asking you to the prom, you can excuse the rest of us for withholding our sobs. Some of us have
real
problems to contend with.

All right, Jack, chill out. Take a few deep breaths.

Sorry. I don’t mean to rant. I’m in a bad mood. I’m always in a bad mood when I wake up. It’s hormonal. Jill, the lucky bitch, gets three full weeks per cycle to live her stupid life. I get four days. Four
premenstrual
days. How many dudes have that complaint?

But don’t go spilling any tears for me. I’ve got this under control. Jill may have her Plan B rituals. Well, I have Plan Jack rituals. They go like this:

Wake up, check that I’m all in one piece, if you know what I mean, then haul my naked ass out of bed. Jill’s been decent enough to sleep naked at the end of her phase ever since I informed her what it felt like to wake up with my nuts twisted into a thong strap. Yes, I have to tell Jill these things. I have to leave her little notes because of all that Plan B stuff she does to obliterate me. I’m telling you, the girl knows
nothing
about my life.

Which means she doesn’t know how much
I
know about hers.

So anyway, first thing I do after taking a monster piss in our private bathroom is check the calendar on which Little Anal Annie has dutifully crossed out all the days that have passed. Then I lie right back down to begin my own form of meditation.

Of course, I skip the “I am all girl” crap. I go right to the black dot. It’s always there, right in the middle of my forehead where Jill left it. But instead of using it to erase things, I do the opposite. I envision myself squeezing through it like a snake into a rabbit hole. Then I project Jill’s last three weeks onto the blackness like a superfast movie and take detailed mental notes of the good parts. I’m not sure she’d appreciate the gory detail in which I record the things she does, says, thinks, lies about, smells, touches and dreams. Would you?

Don’t be judgmental, though. Jill’s life—that petty, grade-grubbing, Ramie-worshipping life—constitutes my only experience of the outside world. I can’t afford to forget things.

That’s how it has to be. I’m a realist. I understand the ways of the world. I have no interest in parading our “condition” around like a circus act. Besides, as long as Plan B keeps working, I don’t have to worry about them finding a cure. Oh, don’t be naive. They’d snuff me like a rabid dog if they could. They tried to. That was Plan A.

Honestly, the fact that “Mom” (and, believe me, I use the term loosely) never came after me with a scalpel is a small miracle. That woman is nuts. You should have seen her reaction on the day I finally woke up. No, not the day Gail Girliepants grew a dick. I’m talking about the day the dick developed an autonomous sense of self. Don’t ask me how this transpired. I’m not a shrink. All I know is that in May of our sophomore year, almost a year after the cycling had begun, I stopped feeling like Jill with a penis and started feeling like me.

That was a messed-up day. At dinner I told Mom and Dad I wanted to be called Jack, not Jill, because, you know, I was a guy. You should have seen the look on Mom’s face. She jammed her fork into her mashed potatoes and said no way. I should just knock that off right now. The fact that I was suddenly, you know,
alive,
meant nothing to her. In her eyes, I was nothing more than an ugly wart on a pretty girl’s cheek. She and Dad talked about locking the bedroom door, even handcuffs. What if I escaped? What if I roamed the neighborhood like the bogeyman? What if I ruined their precious Plan B?

Mom and Dad eventually came to their senses. Well, Mom did. Dad’s senses have been MIA for three years now. She decided against handcuffs and door locks and settled for a sturdy parental filter on the Internet. Big miscalculation. I hacked through it in two days, set up a MySpace page and started downloading epic amounts of porn. It was a short-lived victory, though. When Mom found out—who knows how—she canceled the Internet altogether. The next day, she canceled the phone service. Now only she and Jill have cell phones and Mom keeps both of them with her lest I get my dirty hands on one and make pornographic prank calls. Which I would. Believe me.

Mom and I formed a tense truce after that. I stopped trying to leak my hideous self into the outside world. She bought me books, CDs and Nintendo. But things were never the same. I wasn’t her child anymore. I was an unwanted houseguest. A
dangerous
unwanted houseguest. After a while, I started having dinner in my bedroom. She didn’t mind. She was glad to be rid of me. Dad was harder to read. He always had this guilty look on his face as if he was about to say something but didn’t know how to phrase it. What was I supposed to make of that?

I hardly ever leave my room anymore, except to raid the fridge. Sometimes I bump into Dad in the kitchen, but for the most part, he stays in his basement and I stay in my room. When I need something from the outside world, I leave a note for Jill. She’s pretty cool about getting me stuff: books, DVDs, that kind of thing. She’s all right, I guess. I just wish she wasn’t so boring.

It’s an issue for me because, like I said, her life is my only window to the outside world. It’d be nice if the girl would cut me some slack and, I don’t know, vandalize something, flip off a teacher or maybe experiment with lesbianism. Something. Instead, I’m forced to live vicariously through the tedious non-adventures of Marjorie Model Citizen.

But what can I do? I try to make the best of it. When life gives you lemons, and all that.

So anyway, on March 14, after taking a piss and noting that only one hundred and one days remain to get Tommy Knutcase to ask us to the prom, I lie down, summon the black dot and squeeze through the rabbit hole of Jill’s life. I won’t bore you with the complete details. Suffice it to say, it goes something like this:

Saw Ramie in a bra . . . speed-read Mom’s
Guide
book . . . broke a fingernail . . . tripped over Tony Camere in front of a bunch of football players . . . got Mrs. Wainwright to raise my A– to an A on my
Red Badge of Courage
paper . . . almost wet myself in calculus when Tommy Knutjob looked at me . . . secretively picked my nose in Spanish class . . . practiced Ramie’s alluring over-the-shoulder glance in the mirror.

Riveting stuff, right? Bear with me. There is one theme from Harriet Ho-hum’s Adventures in Snoozeland that always gets my juices flowing. I spend extra time remembering those sections. I savor every luscious, forbidden detail. If Jill ever knew about this illicit pleasure of mine, she’d freak out. Heck, it scares
me
sometimes. There’s something so taboo about it. But what can I do? I’m a flesh-and-blood guy. Just because no one knows I exist, it doesn’t mean I don’t have needs. In fact, I’m having a need right now. Time to leave Barbara Boredom a note with a new request.

March 18

Jill

Ninety-seven days until prom night.

I wake up with the transformation cleanly behind me, do my Plan B rituals, and take down the handwritten note Jack has taped to the mirror. “Dear Jill,” it reads. “Need more porn.”

Ick. But I keep reading. “You don’t want my dirty mind wandering where it tends to wander, so do us both a favor and get the warden to bring back the Net. Thanks. Jack.”

I thought it was mal sharing my bedroom with a smelly boy. Sharing it with a smelly boy who asks me for porn is an extreme dimension of mal.

There’s a knock on the door.

“You up?” Mom says.

I open the door and Mom’s in full work mode: she’s wearing a beige wool-blend pantsuit with regrettably tapered-leg trousers I still have not been able to talk her out of. Her hair is blown and sprayed into strict stasis. But her face brightens into a big warm smile, which creases the corners of her eyes.

“What day is it?” I say.

“Sunday,” she says. “I’m taking Pamela’s shift today.”

I nod, cross off the four previous days on my calendar.

She ruffles my hair and says, “French toast?”

I nod.

When she’s gone, I shower, throw on some jeans and a T-shirt, then head downstairs.

Normally, Dad eats breakfast in his basement yoga hole, but the smell of maple syrup warming on the stove always brings him up. He lurks in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. “Hey, pumpkin,” he says.

“That’s an unusually festive ensemble,” I say.

Dad’s fashion sense is disgusting on his best days, but today he’s wearing heavy green slipper socks, turquoise swimming trunks with a giant bleach stain on the right leg and a holey Three Stooges T-shirt somebody gave him for his birthday a thousand years ago.

“Wait a minute,” I say. “Dad, have you been scavenging the Goodwill bag?”

He curtsies and says, “Waste not, want not.”

Believe it or not, this passes for joviality in the McTeague household.

Dad and I pull out our chairs and have a seat under the fluorescent glare of the breakfast nook while Mom pours the syrup into the little Pilgrim gravy boat and joins us.

“You feeling okay this morning?” he asks.

“Aces,” I tell him. I spear two slices of French toast and drag them to my plate.

There’s frost on the little window over the steel kitchen sink, and the trees in the background are gray and bare. A typical crappy day in Winterhead. But inside, things are nice and cozy, with Dad’s ever-present oniony aroma creating an unusual counterpoint to the homey smell of hot butter and maple syrup.

“So,” I say. “Jack wants you guys to bring back the Internet.”

Dad drops his fork with a clatter and Mom freezes with the gravy boat mid-pour. They hate when I bring up Jack.

“Why?” Mom blinks about a thousand times as she says this.

I’m a fairly creative person, but it is way too early to make something up, so I just come out with it. “He wants porn. He said if he doesn’t get it, his mind will wander somewhere I don’t want it to. Don’t ask me what that means. I don’t want to know.” I pour myself some OJ.

Dad starts tugging on his beard, then jabs his fork into the platter of French toast and drags a piece back to his plate.

I look at Mom, whose face has reverted to its normal state of robotic calm.

“Loan him your father’s,” she says. “He’s got a stack of old
Hustler
s hidden in a box downstairs. Next to his hockey equipment.”

I do not look at my dad. I think I will never look at my dad again. But through my peripheral vision, I can see his knuckles whitening around his fork.

Mom chews her tiny mouthful while smiling that robot smile, as if this were all perfectly normal. Then she pours herself another cup of coffee. “Don’t worry about it, sweetheart.” She empties half a packet of Sweet’n Low into her Relax, There’s a Woman on the Job mug. “All boys do it.” She stirs her coffee and takes a dainty sip. “They’re only a baby step above chimps.”

Dad’s white knuckles release the fork, letting it drop again to the plate.

Mom slices off a corner of her French toast, pops it in her mouth and winks at me.

“Mom,” I say. “I am not giving him Dad’s . . . magazines.” I can’t even say the words “porn” and “Dad” in the same sentence.

“Well, I’m not bringing the Internet back into this house,” Mom says. “Not after last time.”

“I think Jack learned his lesson after that,” I say. “He’s been good, right?”

Mom levels a cold gaze at me like I’m being naive, but sometimes I think she enjoys assuming the worst about Jack. About all men, actually.

“Well, what should we do?” I say. “Jack says he needs it.”

Mom gives Dad a wide-eyed look like she’s expecting him to come up with an idea, but Dad hasn’t come up with an idea in years. Dad is an idea-free zone. I lower my head and sneak a sideways glance at him. He keeps his eyes on his plate while he stabs a piece of French toast and makes it bleed syrup. When he glances up at Mom, waves of silent hatred propagate between their eyes. Mom’s smile never wavers. She can propagate hate waves while smiling, doing her nails, cooking dinner, you name it.

After a few seconds of frigid standoff, Mom lays her fork and knife across her plate. “Fine,” she says. “I’ll pick up some magazines after work. Okay?” Though she looks at me while she says this, it’s clearly directed at Dad for being basically a nonentity in this household.

“Thanks, Mom,” I tell her.

She waves her hand dismissively, then knocks back the rest of her coffee. “I’ve got to get to the office.” She takes her plate to the sink, dumps the remains in the rubbish, gives it a quick rinse and puts it in the dishwasher—all without a single wasted motion. Then she breezes out of the kitchen as if we have not just discussed pornography over French toast.

That leaves me and Dad.

The phone rings and I leap from the table, vowing to engage in a lengthy chat with whomever is on the other end, even if it’s Auntie Billie.

“Hey, Jill.”

It’s Ramie, bless her.

“Guess what?” she says.

I take the phone out of the kitchen and slump into the beige sofa in the living room. A “guess what” from Ramie could mean anything.

“I got into FIT,” she says.

“Nice one!” I say. “Not that I’m surprised, you little genius, you.”

FIT is the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.

“I wish you were coming with me,” she says.

“Tell me about it,” I sigh.

I’d give anything to go away to college, but unfortunately, Plan B will not work in a dorm, so I’m stuck with deeply mal Groton College, which is a Christian college in Winterhead.

“It’s not too late,” Ramie says. “You could apply for second semester. I could take care of you, drive you to your treatments and stuff. We could be roomies.”

Yeah,
that
would work.

I haven’t ruled out the possibility of transferring to a commutable school in Boston at some point, but Mom thinks I should stay close to home, at least for the first year.

“Ramie,” I say. “I am going to Groton to find Jesus.”

“Is he missing?”

Truthfully, college is not something I like to think about. The future, in general, is a big ball of scary. When I imagine what it will be like when I can no longer reasonably live at home, I tend to break out in hives. Not that I want to be one of those losers who never moves out. It’s just that Mom and I haven’t figured out how to evolve Plan B into Plan C: Independent Living. Mom thinks we should shelve worrying about that for a later date. I’m on board with that.

“Rames,” I say. “I’m really happy for you.”

“Thanks,” she says, but it’s dripping with moroseness.

“Well, don’t spoil the fun, dude. You’re going to FIT and I’ll deeply visit you.”

“Promise?”

“Duh. So anyway. College schmollege, what have you got for me?”

“Right,” she says. “Phase One of the Tommy Knutson Project is complete.”

“Shhh. We’re not calling it that,” I remind her. “It’s called Project X.”

I can hear Dad’s forlorn fork and knife tapping the plate as he finishes his French toast in solitude.

“Well, I’ve got video,” Ramie says. “Want to come over and practice?”

“First things first,” I say. “What have you learned about our prime target?”

“He’s not a drug dealer,” she says.

“Excellent.”

“Thought you’d like that,” she says. “Additionally, he was never a prostitute on Hollywood Boulevard.”

“What?” I almost fall off the sofa. “I never heard that one.”

“Yeah,” she says. “The guy comes with a complete set of false rumors. I’m skimming this data from a sea of gossip and innuendo.”

“But you’re sure they’re false?”

“Absolutely,” she says. “I got most of my reliable intel from some kids in his art class who say they don’t talk to him much anymore.”

“Why not?” I say.

“Unknown,” she says. “They got all shruggy and evasive when I asked. I have to say, Jill, the guy does have a quasi-mysterious loner-type vibe.”

“Is that bad?”

“Could go either way.”

“You mean, maybe he’s so superior to his fellow students,” I say, “that he has no need of their deeply inferior companionship?”

“Or,” she says, “he’s on the verge of shooting up the school. Yeah, that’s what I mean.”

I hear myself swallow. But I deeply do not think Tommy Knutson is
that
type of loner. His eyes are too kind.

“Oh,” Ramie says, “and apparently, he had some sort of devastating relationship in New York with an older girl named Tinsley.”

“Tinsley?”

“It’s a rich girl’s name,” she says, “which is good news, given what we’re about to turn you into.”

“Good point.”

I hear Dad screech his chair and take his plate to the dishwasher.

“So, you want to come over and practice?” Ramie says.

“There in fifteen.” I hang up and return the phone to its cradle in the kitchen.

“Gotta run,” I tell Dad.

I do not look at him when I say it. By now, I’m pretty much committed to never looking at him again.

Now, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Project X (a.k.a. the Tommy Knutson Project) is the second-greatest achievement of the McTeague household (with Plan B holding steady in the number one spot). Ramie and I fine-tuned Project X before Jack’s phase while holed up in my bedroom for a nacho-fueled all-nighter. Mom thought we were cramming for a Spanish test. At least she pretended to think that. She approves of neither Ramie’s existence nor my obsession with Tommy Knutson but has, for some reason, chosen to back off. Most likely, she has me under twenty-four-hour surveillance and is pretending to butt out because Project X centers around her
Guide
book. You see, we have turned Mom’s book into an action plan. How? By transforming me into a being like no other. According to
The Guide,
this is supposed to trigger the hunter instinct in men, thus compelling them to propose marriage or, in my case, a date to the prom. And since “being like no other” is a euphemism for “aloof, unattainable snob,” Ramie and I have decided to use as our role model Alexis Oswell, a.k.a. Lexie, the Rich Bitch.

Lexie is, by a wide margin, the aloofest and unattainablest girl at Winterhead High. All her friends go to private school, but her gazillionaire parents make her go to public school because they have political opinions on the subject. Lexie has never voluntarily spoken to anyone at Winterhead High. Nevertheless, she’s made the guys’ Top Five Most Doable list four years running. So has Ramie. I got honorable mention once, along with twenty other girls.

So, while I was away getting my “blood transfusions,” Ramie got sneaky with her cell phone camera and recorded Lexie strutting through the hallways of Winterhead High. I suppose I should point out that Ramie does not approve of
The Guide.
It’s “archaic” and “objectifying” and “antifeminist” and a whole host of other things she assures me I will care about when I achieve her exalted state of enlightenment. She’s only participating in the Tommy Knutson Project—I mean, Project X—because it’s an opportunity to attempt “rebranding,” which is a concept she read about in British
Vogue.
She said that turning me into Lexie Oswell is like turning the Gap into Chanel. Then she apologized and bought me some expensive mint tea because I am
not
the Gap.

When I get to Ramie’s house, she ushers me right upstairs.

“What happened to Chubby Chic?” I ask her. “You’re wearing skinny jeans again.”

She sits me down on her ancient lumpy brass bed and grabs her laptop, where she’s downloaded the Alexis Oswell footage. “Yeah,” she says, “I’ve had a rethink of Chubby Chic.” She sits cross-legged next to me on the thick down comforter and clicks her video software. “Turns out Chubby Chic is not as paradigm shifting as I thought, given the overall lardassification of the American public.”

“Lardassification?”

She adjusts the screen brightness. “Yeah. My new word of the week. What do you think?”

I sit cross-legged on the bed. “It’s nice, Rames. Sensitive, you know, to fat people.”