“What do you mean? You didn’t stay?”
“No, I fucking went home. I didn’t want to watch,” Gretchen said.
“Well, are you supposed to see him later?” Kim asked.
“Yeah, he was gonna stop by tonight. My dad is working late. I don’t know if I want to see him.”
“Well, Bobby got his hand sprained,” Kim announced.
“Yeah? He seemed like he was OK.”
“I think he got expelled,” I said from the backseat, quietly.
“What? What for?” Kim asked.
“He, like, blinded some kid from Marist.”
“That’s fucking bullshit,” she said. “They would have done the same thing to him, if they could have. Those kids from that school are fags.”
“Dude,” I said. “He went up and hit this kid in the head with a fucking baseball bat.”
“Was he the only one with a bat?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“So there,” she said.
“But he was the only one who hit anyone,” I said.
“Jesus,” she said. “Jesus, that fucking sucks.”
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “For the blind kid.”
We pulled up to the mall by the blue food court vinyl canopy. Kim got her bag together and began getting out. “Well, fuck, call me later, Gretchen, and tell me what fucking happened.” Kim hopped out of the car and straightened her skirt, looking back inside the car as I climbed into the front seat.
“Sure,” Gretchen said, staring off into the distance. “See you later.”
“Hey, Gretchen, you OK?” Kim asked, leaning in through the window.
“Yeah, I’m OK,” she said, and we drove in silence, the two of us, for a very long time. She tried the tape player but it was not working and so it was just the two of us sitting in total silence for a very long time; Gretchen knocking me out with her American thighs, me kind of hoping.
“So, um, are you still thinking about going to the prom?” she asked. “Or did they cancel them both finally?”
“No, the junior one is still on. The administration made them pick two theme songs and like work them together. It’s going to be like, ‘Make this Wonderful Night Last Forever,’ which doesn’t even make sense, but that’s all right, I guess.”
“What’s happening with the seniors?”
“I dunno,” I said, and I didn’t because, well, I felt like it wasn’t any of my fucking business really, and also, even if I did think it was wrong, what the hell was I going to do about it anyway? “I guess I’m going. I mean, I want to go. I mean, I haven’t asked anyone. Mike Madden, I talked to him, and he said he could fix me up with this one girl, but I dunno. Like I said, I really don’t want to go with someone I don’t know.”
“Yeah,” she said, not getting it but nodding. “Hey, what are you doing now?”
“Going home, I guess. Why, are you meeting Tony?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”
“That’s cool. If you want to drop me off by my place …”
“Do you want to watch a movie or something?”
“Seriously?” I asked. “Like old times. That would be the best.”
At Gretchen’s we were watching
Night of the Living Dead
, a favorite of ours—you know, the original black-and-white zombie movie—and we were sitting in her basement which was pitch dark, and she was lying on this dark brown leather sofa which was very sticky and ugly and I was sitting on the floor in front of her, leaning back against the front of the couch. The lights were all off, except the TV, which was black-and-white and everything, and I was thinking about turning around and trying to attack Gretchen and fantasizing about us getting it on, you know, on the leather sofa, just reaching up under her Catholic school-girl skirt and well, you know, but then I started really watching the movie, like paying attention, and I dunno, it was like taking on a whole different meaning to me, because of the separate proms and the brawl and Bobby B. getting arrested and expelled and that one kid getting sent to the hospital. There was this one scene where the hero, this young black dude, and the heroine, this kind of high-strung white girl, are like hiding out in this old farmhouse trying to avoid being strangled by the hundreds of zombies, right, and it turns out that in the cellar or basement of the farmhouse, well, there are all these other people, white people, and they were hiding down there and they knew what the fuck was going on upstairs but they didn’t help the black guy and white chick, and so the black guy starts yelling at this dude who is kind of middle-aged and blue collar, the leader of the white people who were all chicken-shit, and the white dude says something like, “We were in a safe place. Are you telling me we were supposed to leave our safe place just to help someone out?” and I couldn’t believe he was saying that, you know, because it was all like school and shit. Everyone—all the kids at school and the teachers and the administrators and their parents, everyone—knew there was trouble, that the black kids were being made to feel like they didn’t count, like they didn’t belong, and that they were fucking fed up with feeling like that, so they were going to do it themselves, have their own prom. But no one, none of the teachers or parents or other students, were doing anything to get involved. Why? Because who wanted to get involved in that shit when sticking your neck out might mean you were gonna get your ass kicked? Not me. But, so here’s the really fucked-up thing: At the end of the movie, all of them, all the people—I mean the survivors, not the zombies, even the black guy and white chick—all of them get killed by the military at the end, and that made me think too, you know? It was all about action.
Action
. That if you knew something was wrong and didn’t stand up for what was right, well, not only do the people who are being treated like shit suffer, but so do you somehow; no matter how hard you try, you can’t separate your life from other people’s lives, so you’ve got to act, do something. I thought about it throughout the whole movie, wondering maybe if there was something, anything I could do, and getting nowhere by only wondering.
At the very end of the movie, they show these still photos of the zombies and of the survivors who had been shot, and there’s like a fake radio news reporter and everything. Well, I turned around and looked up at Gretchen and she was looking at me, and she kind of shook her head, no, no, and I turned back, facing the TV, and then she leaned forward on the couch, putting her hands over my eyes, and in a minute we were kissing all over again. She was on top of me, laughing and saying, “Shhhh,” and, “Please don’t talk,” and I nodded and pretended to zip my lip and she climbed off the couch, sitting in my lap, her legs wrapped around me, facing me, as she sighed and began kissing me, very slowly, very gently. “This doesn’t mean anything,” she said, and I nodded, reaching up the back of her shirt. I ran my hands up and down her sides and kissed her ear and neck, breathing hard there, and she pushed me back against the front of the sofa. We kind of dry-humped like that for a few minutes, and I reached up to pull off her panties but she said, “No,” and I tried again and she said, “No,” like I was a little boy, and we kept pushing ourselves together, rocking, until I came, digging my hands into her hair.
“We have to stop doing this,” she said, standing up, groaning, covering her face.
I said, “Yeah,” then, “No,” and she shook her head, folding into the couch, kicking her legs.
“I’m going to leave,” I said, hoping she’d say,
No, please stay
, but she just nodded and I knew if I didn’t go through with it—you know, leaving—then it would seem like I was totally in love with her, which I might have been. I looked at her once more, said, “Later,” and bounded up the stairs, happy and totally, completely confused, which was almost worse than if nothing had ever happened maybe.
Bad things happened at school. In between third and fourth periods, Mr. Alba, the tall, kind of funny senior Religion teacher shouted at this kid, Keith Parsons, for spitting in the hallway. When Mr. Alba demanded that the kid, who was a senior—squat, thick-necked, a football player and sometime burnout—clean it up, the kid said, “I’m not touching it. That’s what we have janitors for,” and started to walk away. Mr. Alba grabbed Keith by the back of the neck, maybe grabbing him too hard, I dunno, I wasn’t there, but the kid, Keith Parsons, just snapped, punching Mr. Alba in the mouth. Mr. Alba tripped back into some lockers, and since it was between classes, tons of kids saw it, which was kind of weird and funny and a little sad, I guess. The whole school was very uptight. After Bobby B. got expelled, the whole separate senior prom thing was in the newspapers and it looked like it was really going to happen, the black seniors booking their own hotel and their parents helping them put it together, which I thought was cool, but the entire school seemed like it was ready to fucking blow, I guess, fights in the hallways and threats and shouting and this black kid, Ray Love, being suspended for calling Bro. Mooney a “cracker.” It was a very strange fucking feeling.
Later the same day I saw Rod in the hallway and he was looking sad and glum, his dark face kind of greenish.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I hate this fucking school,” he said.
“Why?”
“Look,” he said, and pointed to the back of his white dress shirt, which said FAG in big black letters.
“How’d that happen?”
“Mick Stephens wrote it on my back during Physics class.”
“That’s what you get for taking honors classes with seniors,” I said. He nodded and walked off, frowning at the ground.
Since I had study hall fourth period, I was in no rush. I ambled over to my locker and started putting my other books away when I saw fucking John McDunnah walk past, grinning at me, with his two sport-o friends. I even fucking think he winked at me. And I don’t know what the fuck came over me. I don’t know if it was one thing or everything—all the Misfits songs in my head, being pals with Nick, already having my nose busted once, my dad leaving, my mom an unmistakably unhappy and deafening silence in my life, wanting Gretchen so bad but never able to really be with her, Bobby B. getting expelled, seeing Rod as beaten as he was, or all, maybe all of those things, I dunno—but I just shoved my locker closed, slammed the lock into place, and started following the three of these meatheads down the busy hallway. I saw where they turned down senior hall, where they stopped so John McDunnah could sneak some cigarettes out of his locker, and where they went after that, the second floor bathroom. I had been fucking dreaming of kicking that guy’s ass for so long—I didn’t know how, really, maybe by, like, magically learning karate or somehow punching him in the nose and, like, mortally wounding him that way—that I almost ran up to him and started swinging, but then I stopped and figured something out: John McDunnah was always going to be bigger than me. He was always going to be stronger, broken nose or not; what the fuck could I do to him, to tear him apart, to hurt him?
That’s when I really started thinking. He’d always be able to kick my ass—in like a hundred years, even. I would never be able to get to him. I’d never feel the satisfaction of letting him know I wasn’t just some pussy, some fucking target; that I was a fucking person, you know, that I counted for something. But then I thought maybe that was OK. Maybe it was a fucking waste of time to even try to get him, I mean he was who he was, you know. He was like this certain kind of person and
what was I going to do to change that?
Now I was thinking. I was really thinking.
I got this idea to start putting big pictures of kittens in his locker. That day I ditched study hall and went down to the library and scoured the fucking card catalog and I was in luck, because there was a book called
Kittens
, honest to God—
Why? Why would there be a book called
Kittens
in an all-boys’ Catholic school?
I did not know or care. But I hurried down the stacks, found it, drifted off to one of the library’s remote corners, and started tearing pages from it. I took a pen and a magic marker and started writing these little messages in those cartoon bubbles, like the different kittens were saying them, like, “John is my friend,” and, “John always remembers to feed me,” and, “John scratches my belly,” and I was practically fucking peeing my pants from laughing to myself so hard. Then I tore out a few more pages and made some more messages, the baby kittens becoming a little more philosophical, like, “Be nice, John, like me, a nice kitten,” and, “If you hurt people, it makes me cry,” and I drew a tear under this gray kitten’s eye, and then my best one of all time, this photo of like fifteen white furry kittens all lying on top of each other, to which I added, “Every time you hurt someone, John, one of us dies,” and I drew a small pair of X’s over one of the cats’ eyes.
Then, still laughing to myself, I strode out of library and stuck one of the pictures in the vent of his locker, just one, the one of a small tabby sleeping beside a red ball of yarn, saying, “John is my friend.” I wanted to wait to see him check it out and be totally confused and weirded out, but I thought that might give it away if he happened to see me.
That became my thing then—for like the rest of the school year. In between second, third, fifth, and sixth periods, I began sticking tornout photos of kittens, puppies, ponies, and baby seals in John McDunnah’s locker, hoping it would somehow, somehow make him think about how he fucking acted, you know? But really, I guess, really, I just did it for me.
After school I was sitting on the hood of the Escort and Kim and Gretchen were smoking. Gretchen was acting like everything was cool and nothing had ever happened and so was I then. I had my arms folded over my chest and was acting like I was in a great mood, even smoking a cigarette to show how cool I was with everything.
“So, Brian, what’s the deal with prom and shit?” Kim asked me, blowing her fucking smoke in my face. I could see my own reflection in her big, black, bug-eye sunglasses. “Are you still going?”
“I dunno. I guess. I still got to find a date.”
“So you’re really going?” Kim asked.
“To the junior prom? Yeah, I mean the junior prom is OK. It’s the senior one that’s kinda fucked up,” I said.