I wish you’d stop lying in that bed faking. I wish you’d snap out of your coma, snap out of your nap. I wish you’d just call me and ask me what my deal is. I wish you’d just sit me down and say, “Ade, I’ve noticed all the gashes and bruises and hospital bills. I’m worried.” Most dads, they’d slap me if they saw me the way I am.
But you’re lost between the lines.
You escaped so far there’s no way back.
Ade
TWO
Of course, I already know what I’m wearing.
I want to look good, but it’s hard given the bruising and the cuts. It’s hard given the fact that I’ve got one eye that’s all bloody in the white of it. I dutifully slick my hair with pomade. I brush my teeth three times. I put a fresh stretch of gauze around my head.
First thing I do before school is go visit my dad. Mr. Coma.
What’s funny, and I think this every time I visit him, which isn’t that often, is that for my dad, the future is gone. He’s all past now. Not even present. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think God was playing some joke on me.
Me knocking myself unconscious all the time, this is how I’m supposed to look.
It’s not pretty.
On television, in the movies, you see these people in comas all sleeping prettily like they’re straight out of a fairly tale. They lie there, arms folded over their chests, their skin light and cool as a blanket of fresh snow.
These pop-culture coma people, they’re bullshit.
Here’s what it really looks like: my pop. He’s actually in a Persistent Vegetative State, which I think is just another thirty-dollar doctor term for coma. What makes it interesting is that he’s not exactly like furniture. He can kind of do things sometimes. Not on purpose but just because part of his brain, the reptile part down deep, is ticking off movements. He cries sometimes. Sometimes he sneezes. He coughs. He drools. He shits his pants this horrible liquidy stuff.
What’s really spooky about Dad is when he reacts to things.
You can yell at him and sometimes he’ll turn his head to look at you. Only his eyes won’t be open and, as the doctors have had to explain to Mom and me a thousand times, he doesn’t actually hear. Like not really really hear. He’s just on autopilot. His body doing its reptile things.
This morning I walk in and let my dad know the scoop.
“Today, Dad, is the day I’ve been telling you about,” I say as I sit in the chair across from him. This chair, it’s a rolly office deal and it’s been here for years. The leather is cracked and faded on it.
Dad doesn’t move.
His chest goes up and down. There is some drool on his shirt. Eyes closed.
Recently I’ve been coming to see dad without mentioning it to my mom. I’ve just been talking to him, getting into everything going on in my life, kind of like he’s recording it. And maybe he is. He’s my own personal unconscious diary.
Sitting there across from him, I bring up my worries. “See, it’s the Jimi thing that’s the problem. Like I told you last time, something straight up wrong is going on. A year ago, I wasn’t stressed. But now, I’m paying more attention. I just know he’s going to be a problem. Just know it.”
My dad, I think he farts.
The expression on his face is no expression at all.
I tell him again how Jimi’s an enigma. I tell my dad that the rumors are Jimi lives in a trailer home, that his parents are drunks, that he smokes a pack of cloves a day, that he won the Colorado Teen Thespian of the Year Award two years running, that he sleeps only two hours a night and drinks coffee laced with some suspicious Mexican energy drink powder he bought online. To my coma dad I say, “And those are the rumors most everyone has heard. The ones easiest to prove. The others, the rumors people only whisper, are almost too outrageous to be true: That he deflowered both Nelle Wishman and Jodi Criswell at the same time last summer at a pool party. That he blackmailed Mr. Rosen after catching our married algebra teacher making out one of the lunch ladies. That sometimes he has bruises on his back from where his parents beat him.”
My dad, for his part, just stares into the silence between us.
This gap of nothing, it’s pretty much his whole life now.
“Anyway,” I say, “guy with rumors like that has to be trouble.”
I walk over to my dad’s bedside and look closely at his eyelids. The balls of his eyes move slowly under the thin skin the way sullen fish do under ice. “But I know the future always works itself out. It’s like karma. Can’t change what’s coming down the tracks.”
I have flashbacks to the times I tried to change what I saw.
I see a car accident with my friend in the middle.
I see a church burning to the ground.
I see nothing good.
I pat my dad on the shoulder, tell him that I’ll be back to update him on my situation in a few days. I tell him that he should not worry about me, that everything will end up just fine. “I’ve seen it already, Pops,” I say. “Down to the last second.”
And then, just as I turn to leave the room, I ask, “If there really is some meaning behind all this, some master plan, and you’re like a metaphor or some sort of sign for me, then wake up right now and shout, ‘Hallelujah!’”
My dad, he just farts in his sleep again.
THREE
Mantlo’s your typical high school.
We have our jocks, our wavers, our geeks, our punk rockers, our acidheads, our preps, goths, hipsters, stoners, nerds, bohemians, furries, mods, Teddy boys, metalheads, bodybuilders, otaku, gamers, soulboys, artists, glam rockers, skinheads, hackers, anarchists, cos-players, swing kids, bikers, grebos, scooters, psychobillies, gangsters, queers, freaks, outsiders, and dirties. Just all of them are limper. All of them are caricatures in reverse.
But not Jimi and I.
Fact is: It’s only at Mantlo that we can get away with what we do.
The place is so boring, so white-bread and predictable, that we, the unpredictable element, bring a whole uneasy new vibe to the place. What’s good about it is that our being so “badly behaved” lets everyone else go covert. All the kids on drugs, all the gay kids, all the gangsters, all of them rest easy knowing that no one is going to pick on them ’cause they’ve got us. Me with my ability, Jimi with his outrageousness, we’re the magnets.
Just having us around keeps everything else on the downlow.
The other students, none of them seems to appreciate it. The staff does, though. At least for me. Even though Mrs. Caronna is getting sick of seeing me, I give her something to do, someone to treat, to make her job meaningful. Same with Eveready. Can’t be an effective principal if you haven’t got a troublemaker keeping you on your toes. Fact is: There’re a whole slew of people whose jobs pretty much depend on me doing my damaged thing. I’m like an insurance policy.
And today, that policy is about to pay out.
Lunchtime.
Cafeteria is full and my heart is racing.
Paige, she takes her place beside me just like always and just like always she sings, all sarcastic, “This is the day your life will surely change.” But today, she adds, “Rumor has it there’s a new hottie at school. She and Jimi have been making the rounds.”
I just point at the calendar beneath the food pyramid.
The date there is so bold it’s painful.
Clockwork.
Jimi comes strutting into the cafeteria and Paige says, “And here we go.”
I’m trying to control my pulse.
Jimi, swinging his arms like he’s going to take flight in his leather coat and blood-ox Docs and eyeliner and mullet, he is just beaming. But already this moment is stale.
I know what comes next. I’ve known for so very long.
Love fever.
Epic bliss.
Me, right now I’m trying to figure out when I can hit my head again.
When I can see what happens after this.
After this, I’m drawing kind of a blank.
Jimi marches to the center of the lunchroom and then, like always, climbs up on an empty table and puts his hands to his mouth. He arches back, shouting up into the rafters. “Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, gather ’round. Have I got a spectacle for you!”
And then there she is.
The girl from my vision comes in behind Jimi all business. The way she walks in, it’s like one of those movies where the action blurs right before a musical number. And everyone notices right away she’s beautiful. Wearing all gray with her hair short and curling at the ends, my future girl has this small, perfectly fragile face at odds with the fully realized body in tow. Those overwhelming green eyes.
Paige elbows me. “I think I just swallowed my gum.”
I ignore her. This is my moment.
And Paige flicks me on the side of the head where a sprout of hair sticks out from the bandages that circle my forehead like a sweatband. “You so rock,” she says.
What this is, it’s exactly like watching someone film a movie. I’ve read the script a thousand times and now it’s happening.
Only there are no cameras.
Only it’s for real.
Jimi introduces her with a wild flourish, says, “This is Vauxhall!”
The name hits me like a hammer to the stomach and at the same time it’s like being kissed, just so, on the ear. Of course, I realize that it’s the best name ever. That all the names I came up with, all the ones I made ludicrous lists of, were totally off. Over the past six months alone I’d come up with Zoe, Seraphim, Giselle, and Ava, but seeing her now, none of those work.
Paige, her fingers cold on the back of my neck, says, “I’m already in love.”
Vauxhall gets up on the table next to Jimi.
She’s calm, standing there as though this whole thing has been rehearsed a thousand times. There is silence. The ones eating chew slowly, as quietly as possible.
Jimi steps off the table and starts beat-boxing.
Someone yells, “Faggot!”
And that’s when Vauxhall extends her arms out wide and sings. Bright as a burning building, she sings and her voice is low and smoky and starts almost like a whisper. She sings,
“Your own personal Jesus … Someone to hear your prayers…”
Paige looks at me. “Did you think it’d be this good?”
“Never.”
Vauxhall lowers her arms and stares out. Her eyes pin us to our chairs. Pin us to the spot like the butterflies cottoned and pinned in Mr. Weber’s room.
And what happens happens, exactly the way I saw it.
Down to the very glance.
She moves over to me. Me sitting there enraptured.
“
Your own personal Jesus…”
And just like the million times I’ve seen it in my head, I feel like I’m floating and I feel like the two of us, me and Vauxhall, are the only ones there and all the forces of nature swirl around us as time grinds down to nothing. To only a heartbeat. A blink.
The most beautiful déjà vu. And then it’s over.
Jimi stops. Vauxhall stops.
They step down from the table and the lunchroom is broken from its trance.
And the space where the music was, it’s overwhelmed with noise: the scuttle and squeak of sneakers on tile, laughter and cursing, sighs and shouts. Within minutes the lunchroom clears, only a scattering of students remain.
What’s ironic now that it’s happened, and what I never really noticed before in any of my mental replays, is that the whole thing, the whole scene, is really just your typical high school prank. This, Vauxhall singing with Jimi doing his lame beat-box shtick, is almost exactly what you’d expect to see in an ’80s movie. This is such a cheeseball
Breakfast Club
moment that everyone else but me and Paige is going to forget about it an hour from now.
My moment, it’s such a cliché.
Vauxhall smiles, bows. “I’m Vauxhall. It’s a weird name.”
Paige says, “It’s pretty.”
I say, “Welcome to Mantlo.” My voice cracks at every syllable.
Vauxhall, she says, “Thanks. I’ll see you around, right?”
“Right.”
On her way out she turns and looks back at me, her eyes sparkling in the cheap fluorescence. Paige puts a hand on my shoulder, squeezes. “Don’t.”
She can see my body lurching, my muscles twitching to move.
To run and gush to Vauxhall.
“You will freak her out. She’ll think you’re a stalker. A freak.”
“But not if I—” I try.
“You can’t. Won’t. You need to play it cool. We’ll talk to Jimi.”
I ignore Paige, say, “We’re going to be in love.”
Shaking her head Paige says, “You’ve been spoiling the ending for a year now.”
FOUR
After lunch, Paige and I are by my locker and I’m panicked.
“I don’t know what to do now,” I say to Paige.
She just shakes her head. “You need to calm down. I’ve never seen you this freaked out. You’ve seen it all, dude. Just chill and let the pieces fall.”