“Your Mom’s coming home tonight, so don’t stay at the mall too late,” Dad said just before Christopher and I dashed out of the apartment on an autumn afternoon whose bright-blue sky and crisp, refreshing air felt full of possibilities.
“OK,” I said, my mood dampening a bit as I closed the door, walked down the steps, and jumped on my board to ride to the mall at the bottom of the parking lot. Things had been a lot more lax—and easy—since Mom had started working in Greenville, about two hours away.
Dad hadn’t been able to find a job, so Mom had to work. Her father had said he needed help in the carpet store he owned. So she’d left us and moved back home and started working about a month earlier, after the end of our summer at Gaile’s, when I started the eighth grade and Dad and Christopher and I moved into the two-bedroom apartment that Dad’s oldest brother, Uncle Bully, had bought when he went through his divorce.
This shuffling around to stay with different family members—from Mom’s sister to Dad’s brother while Mom moved to her parents’—felt surprisingly natural for us, because other family members had always stayed with us when there was a divorce or some other exigent situation.
But it was stunning to see how much my parents both transformed after Dad quit his job. Before I was born, Mom had worked as a chemical plant inspector, but she gave up the job when she got pregnant and, for the entirety of my life, she had not worked outside the home—except in capacities related to me and my younger brother. She volunteered at school and had worked on a committee to draft the governor’s education plan, but she saw those things as part of her role as a homemaker. I had seen her virtually every single day of my life, and now we saw each other only on the weekends—and not every weekend.
On the other hand, for most of my life, if Dad was home, he had been either coming from or going to work. Now he woke up and cooked us breakfast. Then he drove us to school and picked us up in the afternoon and dropped us off at an old drainage ditch, where we’d skateboard, and then picked us up again when it was dark. Occasionally he’d go meet a friend for beers at a place he called Leo’s Chicken Lips. Other than that, I had no idea what he did all day, when we were at school, but it seemed as if he rarely left the apartment.
Mom was already there when Christopher and I walked in that evening. We could smell the pizza and had started toward the small kitchen counter where it sat steaming when we noticed Mom and Dad, once again sitting too close to one another on the couch.
“We’re going to move in with Nanny and Summey,” Mom said, using the names we called her parents. “But don’t worry, we’re going to use Uncle Jimmy’s address to make sure that you go to the best school.”
“I don’t want to go to the best school,” I said, sitting on the couch. “I don’t want to move. We just moved. I want to stay right here. I’m in love. I have friends. You’re ruining my life.”
“Your Daddy can’t get a job here,” Mom said, looking at Dad with a judgment as fierce as what she promised would come at the End of Days.
“It doesn’t make sense for us to all live apart like this,” Dad said.
I pushed past Mom and Dad on the couch and walked past the pizza and into the bedroom I shared with my brother and slammed the door. I did not want them to see my tears.
I switched on the college radio station. A punk rock song was playing. I didn’t know what band it was, but I liked how aggressive it felt, and I turned up the volume loud enough that it would annoy my parents. I knew I needed to call my girlfriend, Katie, but I didn’t know what to say. She was older and cooler than me, and I was already afraid of losing her all the time.
I’d met Katie when I was skating alone at the mall by our apartment on Friday night at the end of the first week of school. I was trying to learn to ollie up onto a ledge when she walked up to me. I’d been trying to pull the trick for two hours, riding up to the wall again and again, popping my board up and turning it forty-five degrees in the hopes of landing with my axles on the ledge of a planter that was about a foot high. I almost pulled it, but then my axles slipped off the concrete and I fell. When I looked up, there she was, standing over me, her hair cut short in the back and on the sides, but long in front like mine. She had rings all the way up the cartilage of her ear, bangles and a Swatch watch on her wrist, ripped-up jeans that showed her pale thigh, and combat boots on her feet.
“You’re the new boy, Bay,” she said.
I nodded, stunned to be recognized by a girl. She even knew my name.
“We’re going to see Rocky Horror at midnight,” she said, gesturing toward the movie theater marquee. “You need to come with us.”
“I’d have to ask my dad. But I just live in those apartments there,” I said, pointing toward the fence I cut through to get from the apartment complex to the mall next door, which had a movie theater, a record store, and an arcade. It was also, as I was discovering, where kids hung out on Friday nights.
“Let’s go,” she said. She and her three friends walked with me up to the apartment. When I opened the door, Dad and Christopher were sitting on the couch watching TV.
“Hi, I’m Katie,” she said. “Bay’s our friend. Can he come to the midnight movie with us?”
“Please,” the other three girls said in unison, as if in a chorus.
Dad looked at them, stunned.
“Be home by two,” he said as we walked out the door. “Like Jenks said, nothing good ever happens after two.”
“Who’s Jinx?” Katie said.
“He’s my granddad,” I said. “Except I never knew him. But my dad is always quoting dumb sayings of his.”
After the movie, she gave me her Swatch watch. And then, following a dramatic couple weeks of late-night phone calls and call-in requests to the college radio station to dedicate songs to each other, she was my girlfriend. But she also hung around with older punk rock guys, and I was sure that if I moved away, we would break up.
I felt ripped in two and utterly uprooted. I was also confused. What was happening to Dad? I thought he had quit his job. But it seemed there was no plan. This was all fucked up and chaotic. And if he was quitting jobs, didn’t that mean the whole deal, the “work hard and get a good job you can keep forever” deal, was no longer valid? Why were we lying about our goddamn address? The world was insane. Or at least my parents were. And I still couldn’t separate the wider world from my family.
Over Thanksgiving break, on a cold and rainy night just after I turned fourteen, we loaded up the Gamecocks van again, and Dad drove to Katie’s, where I said a tearful goodbye in her driveway. She put a peace symbol ring on my pinkie and kissed me on the mouth in the glare of the headlights.
Two hours later, Nanny and Summey welcomed us into the fluorescent light of their kitchen. Nanny came up, pale and thin with her beauty-shop hair and a mauve outfit, and kissed both of my cheeks. Summey was standing there in boxer shorts and a white T-shirt, a New York Yankees cap covering his bald crown, a white foam spit cup in his hand.
We called him by his last name because when I was no more than knee high he had told me that if I ever called him anything like Grandpa or Pop Pop, he would kill me.
“Close the goddamn door,” he said as Dad struggled with our cumbersome luggage. “It’s cold.”
Then he winked at me.
I carried my stuff down into Summey’s finished basement, where I would live in what was essentially my own apartment, while my parents and my brother took the two extra upstairs bedrooms. At the bottom of the stairs, I entered the living room, furnished with bright-red carpet that my brother and I used to pretend was lava. I wished I could jump over this whole part of my life like lava as I walked through the room, past a piano on one wall and an electric organ on the other, toward the two bedrooms at the back of the basement.
I stuck my head in the room on the left, its carpet the color of lime sherbet. It had been the room my crib was in when we’d lived in that basement right after I was born. It smelled like mildew, and the curtains were white and lacy. I did not want to sleep in there. Moving here was bad enough, but I didn’t need to be reminded of my infancy every goddamn night.
I walked into the other room and dropped my book bag onto the blue carpet covering the floor. The room was furnished with antiques—an old telephone on the wall, a Victrola on the dresser, and a giant wardrobe with a mirror on the door, all in an ancient shimmery dark wood that seemed to have soaked up centuries. On the dresser I spotted one of the foam heads Summey used to store his toupees when he wasn’t wearing them.
I stood soaking in the spooky antique vibe of the room and looked around. The bed, up against the wall, was both bigger and higher up than any bed I’d ever slept in before—queen size at least and a foot higher than my bed at the apartment. That was one good thing. Since we’d moved out of our old house, where I’d had my own room, I’d spent far too much time in the bathroom jerking off while others banged on the door hoping to get in. Now I’d finally get some goddamn privacy.
There was a second door on the far wall of the room, one that had always been a source of wonderment for us as kids. I opened it. I smelled the mothballs and the dust and the mildew and the old clock oil. I turned on the fluorescent light, which hummed hectically overhead and then illuminated a cabinet of wonders with a staticky, woolen light.
Summey was a serial obsessive, a serious collector of ephemera, who spent weekends at flea markets, jockey lots, and auctions collecting Coke bottles, commemorative whiskey bottles, baseball cards, gold coins, and antique clocks in turn, and this big storage room, which ran the length of the basement, was piled high with endless examples of each. There must have been a hundred old clocks hanging there above me, all in various states of disrepair, their pieces scattered around the room in old cigar boxes, none of them telling time.
I walked back into my new bedroom and looked at the antique record player and remembered being fascinated by it as a kid. It had been fourteen years since I had lived in this basement as a baby, and yet everybody still treated me like a child. I had no say in the direction my life would take, and my parents moved me around based on their whims, as when they’d decided to move here but then lied about our address so we could go to a different school because someone had told my mother it was better.
“A little thing like that can determine everything about your future,” Mom had said.
I punched the foam head. It bounced off the dresser and hit the corner of the room and tumbled down in front of the TV. It felt good. I picked the head up and tossed it in the air and punched at it again, but I missed and it fell on the floor. I needed to hook up my record player, but I was too tired and sad. I turned the TV on. It was only a little longer until David Letterman came on, and I had come to rely on his sarcastic sense of humor in forming my own. I fell asleep on the floor sometime after the opening monologue.
It was cold and rainy the next morning, and I did not want to go to school. I came up the stairs into the kitchen and saw Mom there with a new perm, wearing her work clothes, and ready to go.
“Come on,” she said.
“We can’t go to school,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s raining so hard. Let’s just wait until tomorrow,” Christopher said.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” I pleaded. “Since we aren’t officially in the school yet, the absences won’t even count against us. We could just come back after Christmas break.”
Mom was usually incapable of resisting an argument, but for once, no matter how I angled, she refused to offer a retort. Her answer was firm.
“You are going to school, so get in the damned car right now,” she said.
Christopher climbed in the front and I sat in the back, sullen, staring out the window, missing my old life at the apartment. Mom drove down the winding mountain road from Summey’s house, past the carpet store, which was at the end of a shopping center beside a barbecue place, and then through a bunch of new suburbs that were outside the city limits on the east side.
Whether at Christmas break or during summer vacation, we’d spent weeks at a time at Nanny and Summey’s house all my life, and when they went to work, usually we’d go with them and either play on rolls of carpet in the basement or hide under big metal racks holding displays of carpet samples and listen in as Summey held court with a colorful cast of characters who gathered at the store to talk sports, gamble, gossip, and tell jokes. I knew that part of Greenville well, the world of my grandparents. But as we drove east, toward Northwood Middle School, through suburbs filled with newer houses, I had no idea where I was or if I had ever been in this part of the city before. But I knew, even before Mom pulled up in front of the squat brick building with a covered walkway and two big blue doors, that I would hate it here.
On that first day, when it was finally time for lunch, the teacher told us to line up.
“What’s going on?” I whispered to another kid.
“Lunch,” he said.
“I know, but—”
“Who is talking?” said the teacher, who had fiery red hair, drawn-on eyebrows, and a long green dress. “Remember, there will be no talking at lunch until the end of this term.”
No talking at lunch? Fuck this. At my old schools, when the bell rang, we just wandered to the cafeteria or the outdoor courtyard and conversed with anyone else who had the same lunch period. But here we had to walk in line like elementary schoolers and sit silently with our class.
I almost started to cry as we marched down the long, narrow, prison-blue hall in single file, the hushed sound of rain outside matching the sad streaks of water making diamonds on the windowpanes, but I knew that would only make everything worse. I hated the smell of the school. I couldn’t name it, but it smelled like lonely institutionalized sadness. It smelled like plastic death. I was lonesome and forlorn, stuck in my own skin, watching the world as if from the inside of a nightmare.
We went down the line where lunch ladies slopped food on our trays, and when I sat down and scanned the room, I noticed that the kids at this third school looked just like the ones who had gone to my first middle school, with their Jordache jeans and polo shirts and cologne and feathered hair and gold chains and sports jerseys—and they were almost all white.
I was starting to associate white with uptight, the way Dad had been before he quit his job. Cop car, cop mustache. Everything but the badge. That was white. And that was what all these kids were shooting for. To live lives like their parents. I wanted something different. I was naive enough to think I could opt out somehow.
The next day, I wore a T-shirt for the punk band the Circle Jerks, which had a picture of a man pissing on a pile of records and the words “A Golden Shower of Hits.” A teacher noticed it at lunch. She sent me to the office, and they made me button up the flannel that had covered the shirt when I left home and warned me never to wear it again.
A few days later, I got kicked out of class for talking back. While I waited for the teacher in the hall, I stuck a safety pin through my ear. When she walked out, blood was running down the side of my face and dripping onto the faux wood finish of the desk attached to the chair I was sitting in at the end of a long hall lined with gray lockers.
But I was learning. I could see the way the world worked a little more clearly. There were rules, but there were all kinds of ways for certain people to cheat—and cheating was part of the system. And, according to Mom and Dad, how you cheated could change your life, make you a success.
It was somehow all about where you were in relation to other people. In moving from a woodsy, affluent suburb to a less affluent suburb to an apartment off the highway to the old part of a city—and being a skateboarder who was constantly looking for new terrain—I was seeing even more clearly how where we are can determine who we are. And it pissed me off. Just by lying about my address, Mom could not make me be the person she wanted me to be. So I might have been sitting there secretly reading an F. Scott Fitzgerald story in the English class textbook that I was bleeding on, but I was never going to let them see that. I was going to show them the safety-pin piercing and the Circle Jerks and the blood.
I felt as if I was being suckered into a conspiracy, and I wanted out. But I had no idea how deep it even reached or how to buck against it. It was a desperate feeling, but if I gave up, I knew I would sink into a lie.
After the doctors told Mom I was “retarded” they had done dozens of IQ and aptitude tests and come back with a different, equally damning diagnosis. They told her I was supposed to be some kind of “genius.” Of course I wasn’t. I did very well on tests that had been created to cater to the cultural knowledge that a middle-class white kid would be expected to have but did little to measure my ability to succeed in a classroom, which was abysmal, especially in math.
A whole math class could go by, and I would awaken to realize I had been lost in a daydream the entire time and had not heard the assignment. Then I’d walk out without asking. Mom tried everything. She made me write down my homework and get it signed by teachers. She forced me to sit at the dining room table for three hours every day after school and do my homework. I would just sit there, a problem half finished so I could pretend to work when she approached, and daydream the rest of the time away. As a result, I’d been partially grounded since the fourth grade, and Mom and I spent the better part of our time together arguing.
However badly I did on my report cards, Mom kept pushing to pretend that I was good at school. When I was in sixth grade, she bullied the guidance counselor into letting me into the academically gifted program—which I flunked out of after one semester. When I was in the seventh grade, she did my science report for me and arranged for me to take the SAT for the Duke University Talent Identification Program, which I was still glad I hadn’t attended, and now she’d determined which school I would go to by telling a lie rather than following the rules set up to make such things fair.
Whiteness was part of America’s conspiratorial agreement on what mattered and what counted as success, including the color of our skin. In all these decisions that were supposed to determine my future, the skin color of the people I would be around mattered to my parents, although racial criteria were never directly mentioned. Still, whiteness influenced where we lived, how we dressed, and everything else about our lives, insisting that we do each of these things in accord with its silent dictates just as surely as if they had been encoded above the doors of the public bathrooms where we pissed and the restaurants where we ate.