Hold My Life Sky Barn
HOLD MY LIFE
BY
Sky Barn
skyobarn@gmail.com
COPYRIGHT 2011 By y
Sky Barn
A Smashwords Publication
Hold my life, until I’m ready to use it
Hold my life, because I just might lose it.
The Replacements
I sit in the back of the classroom, notebook opened to a blank page that I don’t plan on filling. Every five minutes Mrs. Anderson, my new English teacher, sweeps by my desk and gives me a nasty look. She’s seen the verbal scores on my S.A.T’s. She expects more. Join the club.
One thing I don’t want to write in my supposedly confidential notebook is how amazing it would be to jump off that incredibly high bridge in the park, even if it’s just to feel what it’s like to hurtle through the air, plunging down into the unknown waiting for the wind to lift me back to safety.
Some people might not consider that as poetic as I do.
And then, when they pull me into eight different offices, where I’ll talk to at least eighteen different people with serious looks on their faces, I don’t want to tell them that I think it might be a beautiful gesture, sort of a monumental advertisement for life itself. When they look at me with those what the hell are you talking about looks, when I feel the crush of the little wrinkle thing on their foreheads, when the walls start to beat with a crazy rhythm, then I know I should have kept my thoughts in my head and not written one honest word.
Anderson stops her lecture on the silliness of love in Romeo and Juliet as she looks over my shoulder. She hates my laziness.
“Mr. Stinson, you have the second highest verbal score in the school, yet your paper on Tale of Two cities was embarrassingly bad.”
“That’s because I didn’t read it.”
“Willful idiocy is the worst kind of idiocy there is.”
Everyone’s eyes burn on me for the rest of the class, and I have absolutely no ability to concentrate on anything Anderson says. I know that it probably is nothing more than a list of names to memorize, or some insanely boring story about how she met some famous professor or somebody when she was in England studying Shakespeare. It’s all just a rush of words to me.
I try to listen to her lecture, but all I can think about is that day last spring when, without telling me, Mr. Henry took my notebook down to the guidance counselor, who called my parents and brought them in for a meeting before I knew anything was happening. All I wanted to do that day after school was to drive around Philly, going to record stores and bookstores, hoping to clear my mind of that unnamable thing that had been bothering me. When I walked in, my dad hugged me so hard he almost crushed me. My mom looked at me with raw, red eyes.
My heart sank. Somebody had to be dead, or dying, and I simply couldn’t think of anything that I had done that would cause all of this trouble. I sat down in between my parents and my mother immediately squeezed my hand so tightly that the tips of my finger tips turned blue. My dad dug his fingernails into the arm of the chair.
The counselor looked at me across the desk and smiled. She was gray-haired and seemed nice, even though I only really dealt with her when I had to drop a class. She read from my notebook quietly, seriously. I heard mom cry and dad let out a little grunt.
“…I just want to feel what it’s like to hurtle through the air, watching the ground coming closer and closer…”
She looked at me and smiled.
“Do you want to jump off the bridge?”
Say no. All I had to do was say no. The first step out of all this was to just say I didn’t really want to jump off that bridge, that it was just an idea, nothing real.
“I don’t know,” I said.
That was truth. I still don’t know. All I had to say was no. All I had to say was that’s crazy, never. I just say I don’t know. I didn’t know. Now, here I am so far from where I should be, thinking about my parents at home walking around with perpetual knots in their stomachs worrying about me, jumping every time the phone rings. They tell themselves I’m safe here.
They’ve never seen tall, big-shouldered Ms. Anderson. With her droopy eyes and smelly clothes, no one is safe around her. Especially me, with my slacking. I didn’t read Tale of Two Cities because I didn’t know I had to read it until the first day of school. No excuse, Anderson told me. I wanted to say that it was a perfect excuse, the only excuse that would actually work, but I just sat down and took the test, not having a clue about anything on it.
I wonder what’s going to happen to me next year, when all of the time I spent not studying or paying attention or doing my homework means I will not be spending time looking at smart, pretty girls as they discuss the symbolism in Faulkner.
I imagine a girl named Miffy, tanned and lean, poring over George Orwell’s essays, or a Toni Morrison novel. She sees me across a crowded room, falls in love and comes my way.
What’s your major? She’ll ask.
I work at Wal-Mart, I’ll say.
Miffy, intelligent, hot and rich, will abandon me and leave with a guy named Kyle, who studies finance at Wharton. They will have beautiful children.
A preppie kid in $100 shorts and an oxford shirt looks over at me and gives two thumbs up. Apparently, he approves.
“Dude!” He says profoundly.
“Yeah?” I ask, not in the mood to make friends.
“Anderson is defeated. You totally rule.”
“Do I? I heard there was a coup.”
“Yeah. Coups are awesome. My dad has one.”
I am now in Indianapolis, finishing up school at a depressingly khaki-addicted prep school named The Holy Virgin Academy. On Fridays, when the school is unspeakably geeked over a football game, they drag us into the gym so we can stand and cheer for a team full of people I don’t know who will be throttled by a bigger school. And I sit there, looking in around in true astonishment, when seven cheerleaders in obscenely short skirts beg the Fighting Virgins to Do it! Do it! Do it! I know irony when I see it, but it doesn’t seem like anyone else finds it as half as funny as I do. They wouldn’t know. I haven’t laughed in two months, thirteen days and twenty-three hours.
The bell rings and I escape into the hallway, empty for a split-second before the flood of kids trying to get to their next class. I have no context. I have just appeared into this life and the life I had no longer exists, at least the way it was. I do not register. At home in Philly, every one goes on with their life, but in a few months, when they graduate, they will lose their context too. Lost in the new world of college, then life itself.
Clinging to the walls like an algae eater in a fish tank, I try to disappear. The pure force of all those people who know each other--have context for each other, understand each other--crushes me the minute I walk into the building. I want them to part and just let me get on with my life, but I feel their looks and stares and whispers so intensely that sometimes I wish they would just punch me in the face and get it out of their system. I am only 18 but I already understand that people hate anything new. It scares them. They run to the things they understand, the things they know. I am none of those things. I don’t even fully understand myself. At least that doesn’t scare me anymore.
On the last day of school in Philadelphia, after I told everyone I was moving to Indiana, my two best friends Kyle and Sheena stole my car keys and refused to drive me home.
“No way,” Sheena said.
“You’ll become a Child of the Corn,” Kyle said.
“One morning, after a night of wet dreams, I’ll find my self transformed into an ear of corn.”
“We just can’t let you become a Corn Child.”
“They grow soy in Indiana,” I said weakly.
“God this sucks,” Sheena said and started to cry.
“Kyle,” I said. “If I start to cry, I’m jumping out of the car.”
“See,” Kyle said jokingly. “It’s that kind of talk that got I shipped to corn land in the first place.”
Kyle and Sheena, a ridiculously awkward non-couple who hung out at my house, or with me anywhere, just so they didn’t have to accept the fact that they were actually a couple and would probably spend the rest of their lives together. Sometimes, I felt like the third wheel. Most of the time, I was hypnotized by their inability to realize that they wanted to grope each other madly and persistently.
That’s all very far away from here. I am far away from where I belong.
Indianapolis is exactly 655 miles away from Philadelphia, where I was born, where I grew up and where I threatened (maybe) to jump off that bridge over the Wissahickon, the one I always drove under when I was a kid. Somehow, desperately, my parents must have thought there were no bridges in the State of Indiana or at least not ones as freakishly high as the ones in Fairmount Park, so they sent me to live with my Aunt, who I always liked more than any of my other relatives, but now looks at me like I am made of very thin, fragile glass and will break at any minute. Every move might be a step closer to climbing to a very high point and thrusting through the air towards a certain death. But I don’t necessarily mind their nervous stares, because I am not always sure where my next step is going to take me, or if I were trying to be poetic when I wrote about jumping off that bridge.
One thing I know about Indiana, something I’ve been freaked out about since I first came here to visit my grandmother and aunt when I were four is the fact that Indiana is full of horrifying tornadoes. They average twenty a year, but there’s always seems to be one spinning in the sky waiting to strike. Soon, I will meet my munchkin.
This morning, before my tenth day of school, my Aunt Jenny came into the kitchen as I sit staring into space, eating my bagel with butter. Cream Cheese grosses me out. She worked very hard on not giving the fragile glass look and I wanted to hug her and say thanks for at least trying not to look at me as if I were the first Mars baby born on Earth.
“Hey, nobody eats bagels in Indiana,” she said with a smile.
For a second, I think she’s serious and started to put my bagel down, but her face immediately opens up with a smile and I realize that she’s only kidding. Sort of. Nobody in Indiana eats Bagels, it seems. Nobody in Indiana has ever seen an ocean. Nobody in Indiana knows who the hell I am and they all think I must be on the run from something terrible. Rape. Murder. Arson. I left right before my senior year. Freak.
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone,” Jenny said.
“It’s been two weeks and the only thing I’ve done right is get to school on time.”
“You haven’t done anything wrong. It’s not about right or wrong.”
“It feels like it.”
“Yeah. I’m sure it does.”
I sit in the breakfast nook as Jenny walks out the door and into her Explorer, driving away to her job downtown. I don’t know what she does. In Philadelphia, I went to school with kids who had more money than my parents would make in their lifetime. When I asked them what their parents did, most of them would shrug their shoulders and say they didn’t know. I always knew what my parents did. My dad was a painter and my mom read the news on the radio. I was on scholarship.
Outside, I slide into my beat-up Toyota Corolla and sit for a second before starting the ignition, thinking about the ten hours it took to drive here. I spent almost the whole trip on the cell phone I didn’t want, talking to my mom, my dad, my friend Kyle, my friend Sheena, my aunt Jenny, and my cousin Steve. They were keeping me alive, making sure I didn’t drive that car, that beat-up Corolla that I loved, off of some bridge in Ohio. Talking kept me alive. At least, that’s what they thought. Everyone had their theories about why I wanted to jump off that bridge. None of them had to do with the feeling of falling. Most thought it had to something to do with my ex-girlfriend, Katrina, and her new boyfriend.
As I drive my Corolla to school, I remember the first time I saw them in the record store. He was a much older, much balder, much fatter guy in a My Bloody Valentine t-shirt and she was my ex-girlfriend, a girl named Katrina who I didn’t even like all that much until she started hanging around me all the time, just sort of started showing up where I was all the time--the TLA for the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s concert, the Rushdie reading at the Free Library, tennis practice--and the next thing I know I’m telling her that I love her, that I want to spend the rest of my life with her, and that we should probably get married as soon as I graduate. How Romantic! She hugged me, wiped a little tear from her eye and looked at me with a beautiful, sad face.
“I’m sleeping with Henry,” she said.
“Who the hell is Henry,” I said.
“The guy who works at the Record Repo on South Street. I met him.”
“The old guy? The old, fat, and bald guy?”
“He’s super sexy,” she said. “And he’s only 26. That’s not that old.”
“For Grad School maybe.”
“I’m sorry sweetie,” she said.
Two days later, I went into Repo looking for a bootleg Replacements’ album I couldn’t find anywhere, though I knew that the real reason I was there was to see them together. I did. I left.
That night, crossing the bridge over the Wissahickon on my nightly three mile run, I feel it for the first time. The impulse to jump. I know that’s what everyone’s calling it--the impulse to jump--but I told the therapist who let me back into school that I wasn’t sure I wanted to jump at all. At least I wasn’t sure I wanted to land. Jumping, yes. Who wouldn’t want to jump? The landing was the problem. The real question was how I would land.
Now, the sight of anything tall—skyscrapers, bridges, water towers, power forwards—makes my head feel like a pretzel. I twist, I turn and I have to sit down before I throw up. It’s only a problem when I’m driving.
The Holy Virgin Academy sits on a top of the biggest hill in Indianapolis, and I have to drive what seems like ten miles up a long, twisty road until I get to the drab, flat building. I sit in my car every morning, working past the dread that I feel, just trying to get another minute to myself with my radio playing the music I want to hear.
The bell rings and everyone scatters to their classrooms. I find myself almost alone, realizing that I have a free period and nowhere to be. I look around the hallway, never sure where I should be when there’s nowhere to be. Down the hall, a dark-haired girl leans against a locker, wearing a London Calling t-shirt underneath her uniform shirt and her skirt rolled around her waist to make it shorter. She stares at me as I walk down the hall and stares at me as I take a drink.
“Do you have a cigarette?” She asks.
“No,” I say.
“Jesus.”
She comes over closer to me and looks directly into my eyes.
“You ain’t from these here parts,” she says in fake Texas drawl.
“No, I just transferred.”
“Senior year? Transfer? Damn. Who’d you kill?”
“Myself. Almost. Maybe. Sort of.”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah,” I say and look away. “Whoa.”
“We should totally jump this place,” she says.
“Jump it? Like with my car?”
“Skip, ditch, leave…”
“I’m not doing that,” I say.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to.”
“I don’t want to do a lot of things that I do,” she says.
“That’s a lousy argument. I don’t want to stick needles in my eyes and I don’t stick needles in my eyes.”
It sounds harsher than I wanted it. Lately, all of my jokes sound like snappy insults. She smiles. She gets it.
I know that if I skip even a moment of school, if somebody in some office somewhere picks up the phone and calls home to tell someone that I’m not at school like I should be, then there will be a series of panic attacks across the country. I feel bad that I make everyone so worried and as much as I want to tell them not to worry, that there’s nothing to worry about, I can’t ever get myself to say it completely. I say things like I’m probably fine, probably or don’t worry. I never say I will not do the thing you are worrying about. I never say I will not jump off a bridge. I never say I will not kill myself.
She’s staring me down, waiting for an answer.
“What’s your name,” I ask.
“Max. I’m Max. Don’t ever call me Maxine or I’ll put a fork in your eye.”
“How about we meet after school Max?”
“Whatever. I might be in the parking lot. I might not.”
“Yeah. Ok. Whatever.”
After last period, I look for Max, hoping to get a glimpse of her at least one time before I have to drive home and sit in front of the television all night. I don’t see her.
What is it about Max, who I’ve talked to for all of five minutes, that makes her image so burned in my brain? Normally, I like girls who are quiet, sad, wear all black, talk about how pretty spiders are when they kill their mate and like to read vampire novels in the back of clubs when their supposedly favorite band is playing. Max seems totally the opposite. She’s loud. She’s got big boobs and a thick, hot body. I can’t stop thinking about her.
For the first time since I started obsessing about jumping off the bridge, I think about the future. I imagine Max and me in the back of a dark punk club, probably on South Street but maybe in Greenwich Village, making out on a nasty red couch while people slam dance around us. I feel her up. She doesn’t care. We leave together, into the dark and cold city night, far away from Indiana.
When I hit the parking lot, I see someone rooting around in my car. A group of people stand around and watches him. I run as fast as I can, convinced that someone is trying to steal my car in broad daylight in front of the entire student body of the Virgin Academy.
I run harder, trying to get there before they drive away forever. When I reach the Corolla, Max jumps in front of me as if appearing out of nowhere. She puts her hands on my chest.
“Whoa. Slow down there Philly boy,” she says with a smile.
“That guy’s stealing my car.”
A big guy comes up from behind the car, extremely tall, with a huge Mohawk and wearing black trench coat. Without thinking, I back up a step.
“It’s okay. They’re friends of mine.”
“We’re they going to steal my car?” I ask her seriously.
“No. Stop. Of course not.”
The guy who was in my car gets out. He’s a little taller than I, a little bigger, a little older. There’s a scar above his eye and I can see a tattoo right near the sleeve on his T-shirt. He tries to shake my hand. I’m still not sure what was going on.
“Hey,” he says. “I’m Tony.”
I don’t say anything.
“I was just checking out the system,” he says. “Pretty cool.”
“Thanks,” I say.
Max grabs my the hand and turns me around.
“We want to go for a ride,” she says.
“Okay,” I say immediately. “Where?”
“Anywhere. Or nowhere. We just want to drive.”
Chapter Two
The August air surrounds us like a hot girl’s armpit-wet, pungent, but still irresistible. We’re in the Corolla, windows rolled down, Pleased to Meet Me playing in the CD player. Tony keeps turning the air-conditioner off. I keep trying to turn it back on. I get my hand smacked away before I can even flip the button.
“Don’t turn that shit on man,” Tony barks from the passenger side.
“It’s really hot,” I say.
“So what. I mean so what. Experience it. Bask in it.”
“I’m melting in it.”
“Leave it off,” commands Max from the back seat.
Turning around to give her a nasty look, I see her tank top and mini-skirt, sweat-drenched hair matted to her forehead makes me want to lick her. All I can think about is licking Max, especially when she sits in my backseat drawing a Rolling Stones tongue on her thigh just below the hem of her uniform skirt. I want to lick the tongue. I want to lick her skirt. I want to lick her shoes, her ears. I’m glad to want to do anything at all, even if it’s simple pubescent lust. I just spent my entire school day re-creating the too short conversation I had with her in the hallway before the bell rang. I saw her for two minutes but she’s imprinted on my mind like the Mona Lisa in the Louvre.
There are two more people in the car than I want. I want just Max and me cruising through the suddenly interesting Indiana countryside, talking about life and how much we want to lick each other. When Max tells me that the tall kid with the Mohawk and trench coat is named Stump X, I stifle a laugh. Stump X is a big dude. He could throw me off a bridge.
Tony sits next to me as I drive without an apparent direction or destination. He’s been telling me where to go for about two hours now and been smacking my hand away from the air-conditioner for about one hour and fifty-five minutes. Max wanted to sit next to me--to profess her love, I tell myself--but Tony barked at her in scary kind of way and she ended up in the backseat, feet on the hump.
I realize that I should hate the whole situation, that Tony appears to be a gangster, or a mobster or someone who likes to punch little children to watch them cry. Stump X stares into space, searching for answers to a question nobody knows.
Looking in the rear view mirror, I swear that I see Max staring at my eyes from the backseat. Or am I staring at her eyes? I try to keep my eyes on the road and concentrate on driving. No one would believe I killed myself by accident.
Tony points to a side street where he wants me to turn left. I pull into the turning lane and look out my window. Indianapolis can go from rural to suburban to urban in three blocks. While I take in the scenery, Tony apparently has been making some sort of gestures to the people in the lane next to us. I was unaware. The next thing I hear is a door slamming and when I look over, a huge guy with a mullet and muscle shirt is just about to bust my window with his fist.
“What did you say to my woman?” He screams at me.
I look at Tony. His eyes are huge.
“What did you say to his woman?” I scream. “What did you say to his woman?”
In the backseat of the huge, angry man’s car sits a very large woman wearing a mullet and a muscle shirt.
“I didn’t say anything to his woman.”
The man is rocking my car back and forth from the side, possibly hoping to tip us over onto the street and eat all of us. I want to live. Every part of my body is covered in sweat and I can feel the blood pump in my toes. My mouth tastes like sand.
The light turns green. I sit there hoping not to die.
“Green light!” Screams the three passengers from the back seat.
I’m suddenly frozen, as if I were watching the most exciting movie I’ve ever seen. The woman in the backseat is simultaneously combing her mullet and flipping us off. The man seems to be even angrier. Before I realize it, Stump X gets out of the car and walks calmly over to the man, who stops rocking the car. He looks as if he is about to hit him. Stump X leans into the guy, barely moving his head when he speaks. The guy stares calmly at the ground, shaking his head in agreement. Everyone in the car sits hypnotized, mouths open. Stump X and the man shake hands and then Stump X goes to the backseat of the car, opens the door and shakes hand with the woman.
Stump X gets back into the car quietly, not saying a word.
“What the hell did you say to him?” Tony asks.
“Not too much,” Stump X says.
“You must have said something.”
“I said some things.”
Everyone turns around and looks straight ahead, not sure what to make of the situation. From the backseat, I hear a voice. I finally can make out what it says.
“Green light,” says Stump X. “Green Light.”
****
I haven’t thought about jumping off of a bridge all night long. I have been entirely focused on the moment, not thinking about what happens after I die, not thinking about all of the things that bother me about being alive. I have been thinking about how much I like Max, I’ve been thinking about how strange Tony is and I know for a fact that Stump X is now my favorite human being on planet Earth.
Pulling into the Burger Chef parking lot, I realize that what seems like the entire Holy Virgin Academy is standing around their cars, sipping on drinks and talking with each other. I wonder why Tony told me to pull in here. I assume that this is the most hated and outcast group of kids and I, like always, have fallen outside the normal range of socialization. I thought that’s why I was driving them around all afternoon.
After I pull into the parking spot, I wait for Max to get out of the car with the rest of the group, but she stays still in the backseat. I look in the rearview mirror and see her lean forward, cupping her chin in her hand. Turning around, almost too suddenly, I look at her.
“I’m sorry about all that,” she says.
“No, don’t,” I say. “I had a good time.”
“Yeah, but…”
She stops talking for a second and looks down at a jagged fingernail on her right hand. I think that she’s going to tell me that I am hideously dull and embarrassingly average. My jeans and polo shirt give me away as just another preppy wannabe.
“It’s just,” she stammered. “I want to spend more time with you.”
This throws me for a loop. I can think of nothing in the entire car ride that would make her want to talk to me, to be around me, to exist on the same planet as me.
“Why?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer and weit in silence for a second, staring at each other as Max climbs up to the front seat. She hugs herself at the knees and then grabs her ankles.
“You have very sweet eyes,” she says.
“What?”
“Your eyes. They are very nice.”
“Really?” I can’t really believe what she’s saying.
“I’m sorry. Is that weird to say?”
“No. I’ve just never heard it before.”
My pants begin to vibrate. I think something terribly weird, but wonderful, is happening to me until I realize that it’s just my cell phone in my pocket. I am not happy to see it. I look at phone and see that it’s my mom, calling from Philadelphia.
“I have to get this,” I say to Max.
“Then you should get it.”
I put the phone up to my ear and keep my eyes on Max through the rear view mirror.
“What’s wrong?” My mother asks.
“What?”
“What happened? Do you need help?” She sounds panicked.
“Mom, what are you talking about?”
“Jenny said you didn’t come home after school and everyone’s been trying to call but you’re not answering.”
Looking down at my phone, I see that I have 15 missed calls and the voicemail envelope is jumping around like it was being electrocuted. I feel my stomach sink.
“I called Jenny and told her I’d be home later.”
“You’re okay?” My mom asks.
“I said not to worry. Don’t worry, I said.”
“Well,” she says. “That’s not really possible right now.”
“Yeah. I know.”
Both of us are silent and I look out the window, hoping to stifle any kind of weird sentence I want to say to my mom that would embarrass me in front of Max.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“I don’t care about sorry. I just want you to be okay.”
“Me too.” “Are you okay?”
“I’m going to go home in a little bit and go to bed.”
“So you’re okay?”
“I’m a little tired.”
“Call me first thing when you wake up, okay?”
“Yeah. No problem.”
“I love you, sweetie.”
“Okay. Talk to you later.”
As I hang up the phone, Max crawls into the front seat, thrusting her butt wonderfully close to my face in the process. I try not to look, I try to be cool and composed and seem like none of this is new or exciting or wonderful, but my face locks and I cannot look away as Max twists herself into the seat next to me. I love how any slight thing she does takes my mind off of myself and all of the people worried about me. I feel normal again just for a second.
“You should tell your mom you love her,” she says.
“Yeah. I just felt funny.”
“Never feel funny about that. She needs to hear it. I tell my parents I love them every time I walk out the door.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I wouldn’t expect it from an alternative chick like me huh?”
“No, I’m not sure what to expect from you.”
“That’s good. That’s the plan,” Max says. "I have to tell you something,"
I don't say anything. I just nod my head.
"Tony is my boyfriend."
I feel the oxygen leave my body. Now, clearly nothing in the world makes any sense. I want to get out, get away, drive somewhere, but Max is still in the car and I have nowhere to go. I'm stuck.
"Really?"
"Yeah."
"Does he go to the Academy?"
"No, they kicked him out a few years ago. He doesn't really go to school anymore."
Silence fills the car. Max opens the door and starts sliding out.
“I need to go with them,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“I’ll see in you in school.”
“Yeah,” I say as I watch her walk away.
Out there, swirling like a teen spirit tornado is the Burger Chef parking lot. Everyone she knows is there. Her whole world. My world is far, far away.
Chapter Three
I sit in my therapist’s office as he shuffles some papers from his desk, looking for notes he took on my first meeting. I’m fascinated by the painting on the wall. It’s a portrait of my therapist holding a shot gun, smoking a pipe and wearing a hunting cap. A dog stands in front of him pointing at the moose or buffalo or whatever he just killed. I suspect that somebody somewhere once told him he wasn’t manly enough and now all of his patients must stare at this ridiculous painting during their session, wishing the dog would come to life and start biting his ankles.
The therapist comes around the desk, finally holding the right notebook, and sits in a big comfy chair directly across from me. He’s so close that I can smell his skin. My knees are practically touching.
“Have I thought any more about my mother’s death?” He asks.
For a second, my blood jumps. Is this the way everyone wanted to break the news to me? When did this happen? Then I get my senses together.
“My Mother’s not dead.” The doctor turns pale, looks down at his notebook and shoots back to his desk, looking for the right notes.
Looking down at my feet is the only thing I can do to stop staring at the gigantic painting hang above him. I hate being here, I don’t want to tell him anything and I wonder if all people in Indiana go crazy because their therapists are so horrible. I hatch a plan to make it through the session, though I really want to talk to a therapist, to sort out some of the weird things that have happened since I moved to Indiana. Plus, I’m still unsure about the bridge. At night, I dream I’m falling. I’m never sure where, and I never land, but every night I tumble through empty space. I wake up confused. The fact that I’m not scared confuses me more.
“Tell me about how you’re feeling,” the doctor bellows in an attempt to recover from his forgetting who I am.
I need to tell someone, but this guy will only turn it into something stupid and not at all what I’m talking about.
“I’m feeling like I want to become a girl,” I say out of nowhere.
His eyes narrow and his forehead wrinkles. He seems interested, almost too interested. I’m lying. I do not want to be a girl, but I do want to drive this guy crazy. He’s a terrible therapist and he’s only wasting my time.
In Philadelphia, my therapist was a pretty woman in her thirties who just simply let me talk until I didn’t feel like talking anymore, and when I didn’t have anything to say she would let me talk about other things until I somehow found myself talking about the bridge and falling. Or I was talking about Katrina and her new, older boyfriend. Or I was talking about how sometimes I walked around in an awful fog, not sure that I liked anything at all about life. And it felt good, my head cleared for a few days. Then things started to build, and then I was back in her office talking again.
“So what kind of girl do you want to be?” He asks, snapping me out of my thoughts.
“I don’t know.” “A blonde? A brunette?”
“Dude, I don’t know.”
I’ve had enough of this and can’t stand it anymore. He has no idea that I was kidding when I said I wanted to be a woman and there’s nothing that I can’t stand more than people who don’t know when I’m kidding. I stand up and walk towards the door, not looking back at the doctor as I grab the handle.
“Where are you going,” he asks.
“I thought I would go visit my mother’s grave,” I say.
He pauses for a second and turns his head in a thinking pose. He looks back at me with a look that makes me assume he just discovered gravity.
“I think that would really bring a lot of closure,” he says.
“You got that right,” I say as I walk out the door.
Chapter Four
After a few weeks, life with Max, Tony and Stump X is little more than nights driving around Indianapolis, dropping Tony off at errands, lusting after Max with an intensity that cannot be put into mere words but can only be felt. I usually end up grunting.
One night, when Tony is out somewhere unexplained, Max shows up at my Aunt’s house. My aunt is in Chicago, on a weekend long date with a guy she met on a business trip. I’m sitting on the couch, trying to watch scrambled Cinemax, when I hear the knock at my door. Max is wearing her uniform skirt and a sweater. I take a step back. She’s never done this before.
“What are you doing?” She asks.
“Huh?” I stumble, thinking that maybe she knows something about the scrambled Cinemax.
“I’m bored. What are you doing?”
“Nothing.” She lets herself in, and stands in the middle of the living room, surveying the surroundings.
“Wow,” she says. “This is boring.”
“Thanks,” I say.
“So, what do you want to do tonight?”
I shake my head, not sure exactly what she’s looking for me to say. Is there a possible other motive behind her question? Is that motive sex? Because if that motive is sex, I don’t want the ridiculous words that come out of my mouth to ruin it. And if that motive isn’t sex, I don’t want her to think that I want to have sex. Though I really do.
“I was just going to hang out here,” I say.
“Really? Just hangin’ out here?”
“I’m tired. I’ve been out every night for like two weeks. Emmanuelle in Prague is on Cinemax,” I say pointing to the flickering images.
She squints at the screen, then gets closer.
“Wow, I think I just saw a nipple.”
“If you wait long enough, you might see two.”
“Yup. There it is. The second nipple.”
Max sits down on my couch, and starts to flip through a magazine I had been reading. She looks up at me as I stare at her, still amazed that she’s there. It’s a ridiculous feeling. I’ve had girls in my house before—Sheena all the time and various dates and ex-girlfriends—but this some how feels more important.
“Come sit down here,” she says.
I do as I’m told.
I sit down next to her and she puts down the magazine so that she can stare at me intensely. I want to look her in the eyes, but its too intense. Like staring at the sun. With breasts.
“What are you staring at?” I say.
“Am I staring?”
“Yes,” I say. “You’re staring.”
“Oh. Then I guess I am.”
We sit quietly. Trying not to look at each other, but unable to look at the television, which is sending out headache causing scrambled images with the sound of people talking in a foreign language and then grunting erotically.
“Where’s Tony?”
“He’s out.”
“Out where?”
“Out,” she says with a little snap. “Out. Doing his thing. Who cares?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Who cares?”
“We should do something,” she says as she gets off the couch.
Somehow, I’m relieved and disappointed at the same time. We won’t be hanging out on the couch, groping.
“Let me show you something,” I say.
“Uh-huh,” she says with a deep chuckle.
I have been in Indiana for a two months now, and though I have been hanging out with Max and her friends, I still find myself alone most of the time. At night, when my Aunt is asleep, I creep quietly in the living room and out the front door. The Indiana night is pitch black, unlike back in Philly where street lamps and gas stations lit everything so brightly that I never had to stumble to find my way. Indiana makes me wonder where I’m going, what’s up next.
“Outside,” I say pointing to the door.
She follows me out without saying a word.
The neighborhood is quiet and full of ranch houses that all seem to turn off their lights around 10:30. I try to look in them from the street, try to get a sense of what life is like here, what people do when they close their front doors, but the only thing I can make out is that people like to watch Jay Leno. Max holds onto my shirt, trying not to stumble in the dark.
On the edge of my Aunt’s subdivision, I take her down a path that leads past the houses and into a little patch of woods that I barely notice during the day. The first time I walked onto it I spent half of my time tripping and stubbing my toes before my eyes adjust to the complete blackness. Then, one night with a clear sky and a full moon, I finally saw where I was. What I thought was a mini-forest was actually just a pathway to an abandoned park.
In a clearing, there is a jungle gym, a slide, a sandy volleyball court and an extremely high monkey bar crossing. Underneath is little more than patches of grass and dirt. I imagine generations of little kids falling as they tried to swing their away across, reaching for the next bar that is always just out of their reach and then tumbling down to the ground below. Sometimes they bounce right up; sometimes they stay on the ground, wailing for their moms until they bring an ice-pack or an ambulance. I wonder what it felt like for them to fall through the air, even for just a second.
We stand in the middle of the park, and start looking around.
“I can't remember the last time I was surrounded by so much open space,” Max says.
“For some reason, I never notice this place in the daylight.”
“I think it would be completely boring in the day time.”
“You’re bored?” I ask her.
“No. At night it’s awesome.”
The moon is so bright I can see everything in full detail, including the ants as they scurry through the grass. I can also see Max’s eyes and her round, pretty face. She looks like a 30’s movie star in a black and white movie.
Out of nowhere, I start to run.
It must be 200-yards to the end of the park. Past the volleyball court, there's nothing but open land. In the moonlight, it looks like a completely calm pond. Can I walk on imaginary water? Might as well try.
Running sucks the air out of my lungs, and I realize I haven't run for months. Before the funk took over, I ran three miles a day, three hard and fast miles. Then, a few months before the controversial notebook entry, I just stopped.
Once I get past the oxygen deprivation, I feel like I'm barely being held down by gravity. My feet skim the grass. The knot of tension in my brain loosens up. Everything is clearer.
When I stop, I hear the patter of Max running behind me. She can’t stop herself and comes barreling into me, knocking me to the ground and landing on top of me.
I feel her hot breath. I feel the inside of her thighs squeeze around my waist. I look up at her as she struggles to maintain balance. I’ve never enjoyed a fall so much.
“Jesus,” she says. “That was fun. I can’t remember the last time I ran.”
“Me either.”
She squeezes tighter with her thighs and comes down closer to my face. She puts her hand on my chest and whispers in my ear.
“Race you to the monkey bars.”
Pushing me into the ground, she leaps up and runs away. I watch her for a second, noticing how the muscles in her thighs ripple when she runs. I get up and go after her, unable to catch up. When I get to her, she’s already standing on top of the monkey bars. I try not to look up her skirt. I fail.
“Come on up,” she says. “The air’s great up here.”
I shake my head.
“Come on. Don’t be a pussy.
I’m not a pussy, I think to myself. I just don’t want to get up there. I can’t say this to her, and I can’t let her think I’m afraid. I jump, grab the monkey bar, hang on for a second and then spin my body up onto the top of the bars.
Standing on top of the monkey bars, I try to look down. I know it's not very far, but I have no idea whether or not I would get hurt if I jumped. I certainly wouldn't die. I try to imagine that I’m standing on that bridge above the Wissahickon, trying to know if I would jump. I can feel the wind against my face. Fall is coming fast.
Max grabs my hand. She looks over at me with a smile, and whispers to me
1, 2, 3…
We jump. We land. Still holding hands.
I’m happy to land. I’m happy to open my eyes again. My ankles hurt a little, but I’m fine. I’m on the ground. I’m safe.
I hear a cell-phone ring, and realize I don’t have mine. Max let’s go of my hand and answers it.
“Hey,” she says. Her face looks different. Tense.
It’s Tony. She waves at me to come and we walk back to my house. She has to leave. Her boyfriend beckons. Scrambled Cinemax calls for me.
Chapter Five
Study hall reeks of alcohol, pot and body odor, which I realize has nothing to do with the Virgin Academy as whole, but has everything to do with the many addictions of the kid sitting next to me. Every day I see him show up in the lunch room just long enough for the monitor to notice him, then sneak out the side door and not be seen again until he slithers into the seat next to me just in time to mumble “here” as his name is called. I want to figure out how he manages to never be late. He must have junkie psychic powers.
In study hall, I spend my time reading novels other than the ones that Anderson assigns for class. Right now, I’m obsessed with Dostoevsky, whose view of life is about as optimistic as mine. In the fifty minutes, when I’m not forced to pay attention to anyone else, or take notes or do group work, I lose myself fully in the long, dark winters of Russia and the crazy, fevered minds of Dostoevsky’s characters.
The proctor is a 22 year old gym teacher/basketball coach who sits at his desk the entire period talking to a pretty blonde soccer player, who puts his hand on her knee and talks to her about what they’re going to do on the weekend. I can smell the inappropriate affair from my seat. I wonder how I would do in his situation: a gorgeous girl, three years older, who flirts with me all the time. I hope I would do better than this guy, looking at her like a kid who’s finally getting the girl of his dreams, except that she’s his student, it’s very gross and he could get fired.
One day, just as I get to the part in Crime and Punishment where Raskolnikov kills his landlady, Max walks into study hall, goes totally unnoticed by the dude talking to his statutory girlfriend and sits down in the seat next to me.
“Good lord, it smells like a Phish concert in here,” she says.
Nodding my head slightly at the sleeping wino, I put my fingers to my lips, telling her to keep it down. She ignores my plea. The drunken sleeping student actually puts his head up when he hears Max’s clamor.
“Hey. Max. S’up?” He says. “Tell Tony I need to talk to him, tout suite.”
After he slurs out the request, his head goes right back down and he’s out. I’m stunned by his weird familiarity with Tony and Max, and can’t understand why Max barely notices him at all.
“How do you know him?” I ask her.
“What?” she says, looking to the front of the room, not paying attention. “Christ, and it looks like an R. Kelly concert up there,” she says pointing to the desk where the teacher and the soccer player seem to be approaching some form of second base.
“They’re gonna wake up Drinky the Drunk Guy over here.”
“Oh, that’s just Kyle. Nothing will wake him up. Trust me I know.”
“How do you know?”
She bites her lip and a sad look comes over her face. Searching for something to look at other than me, she scans the room. Finally, her eyes rest on the book I put down on my desk.
“Crime and Punishment? You need to lighten up.”
“How do you know him?” I persist.
“In my whole life, I’ll probably never commit a crime and I sure as hell won’t be punished if I do.”
“Seriously,” I interrupt. “Where do you know this guy.”
“Jesus, you probably will be a cop though,” she says. “He’s Tony’s friend.”
“Really?”
“Well, friend may be a bit strong.”
“I don’t get it.”
Confusion continues to overwhelm me, though I realize that I’m just simply more agitated by the idea that Tony, and by extension Max, is friends with this horrible waste case who sits next to me everyday. Then, my anxiety is interrupted by the booming voice of the study hall proctor, who now appears to have his “student” sitting on his knee.
“Max quiet down,” he shouts.
The soccer player waves her finger, urging us to obey the rules.
“I’m sorry. Did we stop a hand job or something?”
“Yo!” The teacher shouts.
Even the drunk kid wakes up.
“I’m sorry,” Max says. “Did I do something horribly, disgustingly wrong that might get me fired, oh wait, I mean expelled?”
“Go to McGuire’s office right now.”
“Okay. Should I report how traumatized I’ve been by the serious teacher on student petting that goes on in study hall?”
“Go!”
She turns towards me and shoots a quick “call me” sign with her hands, and breezes out the door, stopping only to blow the teacher a kiss.
“Why doncha come up and see me some time?”
“OUT!”
I try to act as if I didn’t see any of what just happened, opening up Crime and Punishment, but wishing it was Invisible Man.
“Is she even in this class?” The teacher asks to no one as the bell rings.
When I come out of the classroom, she’s waiting by my locker, jacked up on the adrenaline of telling off a teacher. I’m still a little frustrated that she never answered that question.