Four

“Don’t you get it?” I said, handing Drew the Koren cartoon. I hated that anxious note in my voice. What did it matter if Drew got it or not? When was I going to stop being so damn dependent on his good opinion?

It was lunchtime and we were outside, sharing Winston High’s somewhat soggy lawn with about two thousand other students playing killer Frisbee, eating, and looking for places to make out or smoke. Winston High is one of those windowless wonders. As soon as the snow melts, the cafeteria is deserted. Even in the middle of winter, there are diehards who go outside and sit in snowdrifts to eat their lunches.

Drew pulled at his lower lip as he studied the cartoon. I’d cut it out of an old New Yorker magazine that had been hanging around my uncle’s office. I practically worshipped Koren as a true genius. His cartoons were tacked up all over my bedroom walls. This one showed four typical shaggy Koren animal-people—or people-animals, take your choice—with their fuzzy clothes and anteater snouts, sitting around a fire in a living room. They were all holding wineglasses and while the other three smiled benignly on her, one of the female shaggy types said, “I love to be alive. It’s fun.”

“You really think that’s funny?” Drew said, handing back the cartoon. “‘I love to be alive, it’s fun’? I don’t get it. I mean, that’s pretty obvious.”

“That’s the point. It’s so obvious and banal and understated. That’s what makes it funny.”

Drew slung an arm over my shoulder. “I’ll take your word for it. Wendy Varner called me last night. You should have heard her. You should have heard the things she said.”

“Quit slobbering on my neck. Don’t you ever think about anything except girls?”

“Do you?”

“Now and then, now and then. Anyway, I thought you were in love with Joanie.”

“I am.”

“So what’s this Wendy Varner stuff?”

“She called me. What was I supposed to do? Hang up on her?”

“Dear Drew,” a girl had written him in third grade, the year he and I had become friends, “I love you.” And ever since, girls had been slipping notes into his desk, his books, and his locker, one way or another always leaving the same message. “Dear Drew, I love you.”

It was truly depressing to think about his endless string of girl friends. As far as girls went, he was world-class and I was no-class. I could count my lifetime record for girl friends on the fingers of one finger. Barbara Hart, who not only let me kiss her behind Wood Street Elementary School but also, in exchange for a mere bag of marbles, showed me a patch of her bare stomach, including belly button. Hot stuff for fifth grade. However, that moment of glory was far behind me. A long drought since then.

I’d always liked girls. It didn’t come on me suddenly, ta ta! ta ta!, big burst of adolescent frenzy. What had changed was how much I liked girls and how much it bothered me that there wasn’t a girl in sight who liked me back.

I fingered the two hairs on my chin. Drew had a mustache already. “Remember Barbara Hart?”

“Fifth grade,” Drew said. “All Hart. What brought her to mind?”

“Did I ever tell you I had a hot romance going with her?”

“Who didn’t?” Drew said, chewing on a twig. “When she moved away, she had the biggest marble collection in Wood Street School.”

I sat up. “You’re just saying that to drive me crazy.”

“Ah, Pete! For a smart guy—Did you think you were the only one? I bet she gave you the old belly-button treatment, too. Right? Right? Six marbles?”

“You only had to give her six? A whole bag of my best marbles.”

“Now that’s funny!”

I punched him on the arm. “The hell it is.”

He grinned and gave me a stinging slap on the cheek. “Sure you want to start this, Pete?”

“I’ll take you.”

“It’ll be the first time.” Another slap.

We had met eight years ago on my first day in Wood Street Elementary School third grade. I had lived with my uncle for about two weeks by then, spending my days playing around his office. In school, in a hushed sorrowful voice, he told the principal that I had always been taught at home by my parents, who had recently died and left him to be my guardian. Things, he said, were still chaotic, and he didn’t have the family documents yet.

Miss Simpson, the third-grade teacher, put me in the seat next to Drew. Greenwood, Gregoretti. Later that day, she told me I did fine work and that maybe I could help Drew with his reading. Then she asked me what Pax was short for.

“It means peace.”

“Well … yes. Peace. I thought maybe it was a family name?”

I shook my head no and then yes, and she let me go. I reported this conversation to my uncle at suppertime.

“I guess we didn’t think of everything,” he said. By then we both knew that I would be staying with him longer than a few days or a month. Word had come to him, again through an anonymous phone call, that it would be for a year, at least. After that call, the decision had been made for me to enroll in school under Gene’s name. He said, “Maybe it would be a good idea to change your first name, too. Not too much, hmmm? How does Pete sound to you?”

“Okay.”

In school, I told Miss Simpson that Pax was just a nickname and she should call me Pete. No one ever remembered that for one day I had been Pax—except me. For months, I was anxious about my name, afraid I’d forget, not respond when the teacher called on me. And I was constantly on guard, waiting for some kid or teacher to come up and say, Hey! How come you changed your name? Just the thought of it turned me damp and hot with anxiety. I figured out what I’d say. At home, I wrote it down and I memorized it. I didn’t change my name! I told you, that was just a family name, sort of a nickname. My name is Pete! I practiced saying it to my mirror and to Emory Doghead Dog. But inside me, I knew that, no matter what I said, they wouldn’t believe me, that something in my voice or my face would give me away.

After about six months of being Pete Greenwood, it began to seem almost like my real name. Sometimes I even wrote it on my school papers without first reminding myself, You’re Pete Greenwood. I had taken to writing very carefully, very slowly, to give myself time to remember. But even after I began writing “Pete Greenwood” automatically on top of my school papers, I never got over my fear that someone would know or guess the truth about me.

I worried the most about Drew, because we were together so much. It was Drew who decided we were going to be friends. Every morning, wearing a Yankee tee-shirt and tossing a baseball, he waited for me on the corner of Brighton and Western avenues near the school. He must have worn something else at times—a jacket, a sweater—but what I remember is that Yankee tee-shirt and his blue baseball cap. Even then, when we were only eight years old, he was built like a tree. He was solid. And even then, despite my nearly constant underground anxiety, I knew that I would always know where I stood with Drew. There were no surprises, no shadows, nothing hiding behind his rosy-faced friendliness but friendliness. Knowing that Drew would be there on that corner made it a lot easier for me to get out of bed every morning in this strange new world, without my parents and without my own name.

“Got you!” Drew said now, grabbing me in a bear hug. I managed to hook a foot behind his ankle and we both went down, but with Drew on top.

“Say uncle, Pete.”

“Like hell.”

“Uncle, Pete!”

I pounded him. He grabbed my hands and held them easily in his two big paws. My helplessness brought something sour into my throat. I thrashed around. “Get the hell off me, Gregoretti.”

He didn’t move, grinned wider, sat there big and superior. I love you, Drew, the girls said, but never had one said it to me. I stopped struggling and just lay there and felt depressed about everything. Girls … and what I knew about me and my parents that no one else knew … and how it set me apart … made me different from everyone else. Secretly different.

On some level, I was always pretending, always playing a role. See me be Pete-the-normal-average-American-boy. My differentness wasn’t something I could point to or talk about. It wasn’t like the comedian I’d seen on TV, a woman who had cerebral palsy and made you laugh about things you always thought you had to be so secret and sober about. One of her routines was, “Hi, I’m Jill, I have cerebral palsy. What’s your problem?”

Hi, I’m Pete-Pax, I have parents hiding from the law. What’s your problem?

“Hey, bozo, say uncle.”

“Forget it.”

“Stubborn little runt, aren’t you?”

I forced a grin as big as his. It was unworthy of me to be depressed. Hal and Laura were the special people. Heroes, doing the deeds that would save humanity. In a flash I saw them bestriding the world like the ancient gods and heroes, my mother an Amazon, my father a Colossus. Next to them, all others were puny. I forced the smile to be proud … my mouth stretched … Hal … Laura … you’re mine, my parents … someday everyone will know.…

My forehead broke out in a sweat. Everyone will know. Just thinking it was like a door opening. The other thoughts came sweeping in through that open door. Those people … shouldn’t have been there … bodies … why did they … bodies … and two people … No. No! No. Push it away, don’t think it, don’t let it be there in your head.

I closed my eyes, blanked out. Nothing there. No thoughts, no bad thoughts, nothing … nothing.

“Hey, you playing dead?” Drew lightly slapped me on the face.

I kept my eyes closed.

Nothing … nothing … nothing … my mind all dark and empty, blank …

The bell rang. “Saved by the bell,” Drew said, getting up. “Next time, Pete, you say uncle twice to make up for it.”

I stood up, stretched, yawned and yawned and yawned. I was suddenly exhausted. It was an effort for me to lope along with Drew toward school, an effort to say in as casual a voice as his, “You could have sat on me till Christmas and I wouldn’t have said it.”