Authors: Jason Myers
So far this year, I've been suspended three times. For the uniform bullshit, and then for punching this junior asshole, Timothy Beck.
He was whipping this fat kid, Miles Worthy, with a wet towel in the locker room. Miles was crying, but Timothy kept doing it.
It was so wrong and so evil and the teacher wasn't even doing anything to stop it.
Timothy Beck is the starting quarterback and the starting point guard.
So I just walked up to him, and he went, “What the fuck do you want, faggot?”
And I smirked and I said, “Your girlfriend's a fucking gnar pig and her haircut sucks.”
And then I punched him in the nose. As he stumbled backward, falling on his ass, I ripped the towel away from him and whipped him right in the nuts with it. He started crying, and I got in trouble.
The third time I got suspended was for correcting my English teacher about something he said about Steinbeck as fact. It wasn't true, and when I said so, he dismissed it and double downed his assertion. I couldn't let it go. I know for a fact that
Grapes of Wrath
was never translated and published in Japanese under the title
The Angry Raisins
.
What a fucking idiot.
It turned into an argument, and I called him a few names, and he kicked me out of class. But before I left, I looked at all my classmates and told them that for a hundred bucks, I'd write their three-page paper on “Of Mice and Men” that'd been assigned to us earlier in the period.
That suspension was for two days, and even though I'd made this proposition in front of my teacher, four kids reached out to me to write their papers.
I jacked up the price to $150, and they all paid.
They all got As.
Me, I got a C+.
It was a joke.
I understood what my teacher was doing by giving me that grade, but he wasn't being honest with himself. He was being such a fake by giving me that phony grade.
And I can't stand fake or fucking phony.
This school year is over in a week, and I've got a 3.9 because of that grade instead of the 4.0 I've gotten every semester since sixth grade.
Whatever and shit.
I've still got the best overall grades of anyone in my class over the past three years.
MY BLACK EYE IS DRAWING
some serious attention. As if rolling up in a taxi, like, ten minutes late for school wasn't intriguing enough for these boring souls, a shiner befitting an amateur boxer is just too much for these kids.
They keep glancing at me during class. I hear them whisper to each other. Some of them point and most of them laugh. Even two of my teachers do the same as I'm grabbing books from my locker in between classes.
It's all so miserable and pointless. And it comes to a head in the locker room when this turd burglar, William Cross, starts talking shit about my face.
“Hey, faggot,” he says. “Did you fight your piano?”
I roll my eyes.
“Queer Miles,” he rips. “Did you fight your imaginary friend?”
I say nothing and run the video for that Future Islands song “Little Dreamer” through my head.
William throws a towel at me.
These people just can't stand to be ignored.
And he goes, “Did your crazy momma beat your face up, little boy? Did she get drunk and beat up her loser kid?”
He wanted my attention and now he gets it.
“What's your fucking problem, asshole?”
“I hate queers,” he says. “Especially queers who let their momma smack them around. Drunk bitch.”
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 storiesâ“She Kills Love” and “The Whore”âfrom 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.