No superhero, no Chosen One, no budding witch or demigod or changeling gets better by playing it safe. Sooner or later, you will have to put yourself in a dangerous situation. You will have to test yourself. You will have to risk losing everything, before you can gain anything.
DAY: 8
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 1000
Two hours before Tariq came to pick me up, while Mom napped, I stole her cell phone from her purse and took it to my room. A simple thing, old and clunky, but that was better, because a smartphone might complicate the kind of shenanigans I needed to pull off.
I switched out Mom’s SIM card for Maya’s. And sent a text message to Tariq, which would look to him like it came from her:
I’m going to tell.
Almost immediately, Mom’s phone vibrated in my hand. TARIQ, it said. I pressed the red button to reject the call.
A text came in.
Please don’t.
There were so many things I wanted to say. But I bit my lip and rode out the silence.
A second text from him: It would destroy my life.
At this I smiled, and thought: Like you destroyed hers?
A second call. Again I rejected it. And then, five minutes later, he texted: Why would you do that to me? After what we shared?
So. There was something. I didn’t know what, and I needed to be very very careful about what I said, because one wrong word would trigger his suspicions that something was up.
People need to know, I wrote.
I know you’re mad, came his response. But that doesn’t give you the right to hurt me. What’s going on? Can we talk? I’ve been trying to call you at—
Rage made me rip the SIM card from Mom’s cell phone. That doesn’t give you the right to hurt me. He believed he could harm her with no consequences, but if she tried to fight back she was—what? Violating the Rules?
I stuck the SIM card back in, and looked up Maya’s bandmates, and scribbled down their numbers. Then I took it out again, hid it where I kept my porn flash drives, brought the phone back to Mom’s purse, went outside.
Hunger and rage tore and screamed inside me, a whirl of blades that shredded the walls of my stomach. The generator in my gut had been cranked up too far by my anger, and the electricity threatened to split me open.
I had to calm down. My ride would be here in a second or two.
Of course it was a pickup truck. Of course it was brand-new, red, too big for Tariq, detailed with fiery half-circles around the tires. Of course he drove it with a face of grim tight worry, like it was a test of his manhood or a bull that at any moment might buck him. But when he pulled up to a stop and put it in park, his smile was epic.
“Hey, Matt,” he said when I climbed up and opened the door. I’d asked him to meet me down the block. Told him it was because I didn’t want my mom to know I was leaving, but really it was because I didn’t want him to see my house. Its ramshackle frame, its unmowed lawn with fallen leaves piled three inches deep.
When he picked up Maya, it would have been nighttime. He wouldn’t have seen, then.
“Hi,” I said, trying several unsuccessful times to shut the door once I was in.
“You really gotta slam it,” he said, reaching past me to grab the handle and wrench it shut with a manly yank.
The senses kicked in hard. It smelled like him in here. Like a well-used pair of soccer shorts had spent several weeks under one of the seats. The intimacy of it was electrifying.
“You got a curfew?” he asked, looking distracted.
He kept glancing at his phone. The texts had shaken him up, no doubt about it.
“Not when no one knows I’m out,” I said.
He laughed. Did he ask her the same question when she got in? Did she have a hard time shutting the passenger-side door? I looked down at my feet. Punk rock flyers and pamphlets littered the floor. SMASH THE SYSTEM, one of them urged, and another said GOD IS A LIE THEY TELL YOU TO MAKE YOU BEHAVE.
“I didn’t know you were into punk,” I said, thinking of Maya.
“Only pretty recently. I just love it. There’s so much . . . anger.”
“What do you have to be angry about?” I asked. “Everybody loves you.”
Tariq laughed, but it wasn’t a funny laugh. “That doesn’t mean I have nothing to be pissed about.”
It occurred to me to be afraid. If he had hurt Maya, he wouldn’t think twice about hurting me. And the texts I sent had made him uneasy, anxious. People, like animals, are at their most dangerous when they’re afraid.
So I stepped back from what I’d been about to say—Kids whose dads can afford to buy them fancy new pickup trucks don’t have a right to be pissed.—and said nothing at all. He started the car, and we were on our way, the radio filling in the silence.
A few blocks later, he said, “You’ve never been interested in this kind of party before, so what made you want to come to this one?” He smiled when he said it. A cautious smile.
“Maybe I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about.”
“Yeah, well, you’re in for a disappointment. I wasn’t sure if I was even going to go, until—”
He stopped the sentence, but I think I knew where it was going.
The sad, dirty, trash-strewn roads of my neighborhood were extra pathetic, looking down on them from the cab of that truck. The extra height gave me distance, perspective, but so did knowing how Tariq must have seen them. This is a place where hard-up people live: workers in the quarry and the zipper factory and the slaughterhouse. People easily taken advantage of. Girls I can hurt with no consequences.
“Got a cigarette?” I asked, when he came to a stop along a strip of dark road beside a bunch of other cars. Music thumped in the distance. I turned my head in that direction so I could burrow down deeper into the noise of all those people, hear the interwoven strands of so many conversations.
“Full of surprises tonight, Matt,” he said, pulling a pack from his back pants pocket. Then he reached past me to open the glove compartment. Out came a book of matches and the Hudson High School library’s copy of On the Road.
“You?” I asked. “I was waiting for that book—you checked it out?”
Tariq nodded, looked out his window. “Jack Kerouac. I saw you reading that book by him,” he said. “It looked interesting.”
I read the first sentence of the book, then shivered. The whole thing was just too weird. I put the book back.
He handed me a cigarette, stuck one in his own mouth, lit a match, then lit the cigarette, then held the lit match out to me. In a haze of mesmerized self-hate, I watched his hands fly gracefully through these motions. I lit the cigarette. Then we turned and walked toward the sound of screaming.
“Tariq!” came a booming shout as we drew near a house with pale-blue vinyl siding and expensive landscaping. The whole soccer team was out front, and for a moment I panicked, convinced that Tariq had led me like a lamb to the slaughter. They were waiting to jump me, bash me, break my arms, kick my face to pulp. But one sniff and I knew they were harmless: drunk, jolly, their attention and energy scattered across a dozen things—getting more beer, banging some chick, a couple of them thinking about a beef they had with someone else that might blossom into violence if that jerk showed up tonight.
Cigarette smoke scraped me raw, scorched my throat, and filled my lungs. This new pain distracted from the pain in my stomach. I grinned, slightly, to myself.
Tariq shared bro-hugs and handshakes and hellos with his fellow teammates. “You all know Matt, yeah?” he said, and some nodded and some looked down and some raised their plastic beer cups in an intoxicated magnanimous show of welcome.
I smelled them. And I listened. And I could go deeper now. Drunk people don’t guard their thinking. I focused on my senses, and then, I could hear scraps of words. Phrases that might have been their thoughts.
This faggot. Why’s he here?
Does he even go to our school?
I need more beer, but I don’t want to go inside.
Could this be real? Could I actually read people’s minds?
If I could, I was going to put it to good use. I zeroed in on Bastien and Ott, but both looked away as soon as they saw me. Bastien at least had the sinister intelligence to blink away his discomfort and smile. “What’s good, Matt?”
“Not much.”
They disliked me, so they were guarded. Their thoughts impenetrable even if they were some combination of drunk and high.
I glanced around.
I had never been to a high school party before. People stopped inviting me around fifth grade. That was also the time people started calling me faggot. I don’t know how they knew. I didn’t know myself.
At any rate—I’d been wrong to be so afraid of this. I’d always pictured these parties as frenzies of alcohol and weed and sex and violence. And while the first two were certainly in evidence, everyone seemed about as frenzied as an anaesthetized cow. Instead of the hate I always thought lurked beneath every handsome jock’s facade, there was mostly apathy. Instead of the violence I always associated with alcohol, there was mostly just a doofy happy lazy buzz. I stood there, smoking, almost belonging.
“Come on inside,” Tariq said, “let’s get you some food.”
In the house, I shut my eyes and smelled, and knew at once that the place belonged to a boy in my grade named Griff. That his parents were not home. Two stuffed moose heads and a taxidermied alligator watched Tariq and me stroll through.
“Hungry?” Tariq said when we got to the kitchen. I almost laughed. Food covered every surface of the place, great unhealthy heaps of it, oily chips and creamy dips, baked frozen fried breaded appetizer monstrosities, store-bought cookies stacked like coins, sugary sodas, all of it sending broken-glass shivers of agony through my midsection. I smothered the pain with one last long pull on the cigarette and stubbed it out sadly.
“Nah,” I said.
He smiled. A lonely smile. Open and trusting. And yet, I couldn’t read his mind, either. No doubt, he was an expert at hiding things from the people around him.
But then again, so was I. “Let’s go get us some beer,” he said.
I followed him outside, down a long, dead, sloping lawn, through flocks and gaggles of boys and girls. I tensed, every muscle anticipating some sort of attack.
I thought of those scenes in The Birds when for no reason at all the birds cease to be evil and violent and just stand around harmlessly, apathetic to human beings instead of bent on their destruction. Maybe I was safe . . . for a little while.
Once I no longer feared my own death, I heard everything. Scraps of conversation, words that said almost nothing—while my sense of hearing detected so much more.
“So I went out for the team—”
“All I know is there were rumors—”
“I just stood there, I was so shocked, I couldn’t believe she said that—”
Underneath I heard happiness, fear, insecurity. I looked from person to person in a state of tingly shock. I inhaled. I knew that Tammy Ladonnia was pregnant, and that Pete Shumsky was the father, and I knew that she knew it, and he did not.
I detected things others did not. I saw, heard, and smelled things others could not.
Somehow, I had become Peter fucking Parker.
Somehow, I had—could I even say it? I had powers.
I followed Tariq down to a bonfire, blazing tall and bright against the dark. I walked a little bit behind him. His shoulders were so broad, backlit by the fire in front of him. His arms filled out his sweater so nicely. Sad, jangly pop music blasted from a parked Jeep. I let him pour me a beer, but resolved not to drink it. He poured one for himself, and took a sip, and then looked up—
“Pass that bottle,” he said, too loudly, seeing glass glint in the firelight, and joy and relief crackled in the air around him. Someone laughed, came closer, dumped tequila into his beer.
“More . . . ” he said, laughing, “more . . .” even when it overflowed and soaked his fingers. He took a long, long sip.
I stepped closer and breathed him in. Really breathed. Looked past all the surface smells, the stink of the world he walked through . . . and then past the smells of him, of the outer shell of his body: sweat and hair and saliva, and found:
Loneliness.
Tariq gave off a crushing, overpowering loneliness. A smell of McDonald’s breakfasts eaten alone in parking lots, and long hours standing on the edge of a circle of friends, and the bitter odor of knowing none of his buddies truly knew him. Girlfriends who dated him to piss off their parents but who didn’t care about who he was as a person. Random strangers responding with hate and suspicion to his Middle Eastern name or looks.
Loneliness.
The smell was so strong, I wobbled on my feet. For a split second, I faltered. The rage and hate cooled into pity.
He’s miserable, I thought.
Then I thought better. So what, I told myself. That doesn’t give him the right to hurt people. That doesn’t diminish or excuse the hurt he’s caused.
I stepped closer, tapping into some ancestral genetic carnivore. Some feral creature who knew loneliness for what it was: a weakness. Tariq was desperate for a friend. His body had snitched on him.
I could be that friend. I could get close enough to make him feel safe confiding his loneliness. His pain. And something else—
A secret. Something so big and so dark it blotted out the space between us, turning Tariq into a swirl of night beside me.
Except I already know your secret. Or—almost. And when I learn it, when I know exactly what you did, nothing will save you.
He stood beside Bastien and Ott, both of whom were still trying hard not to look in my direction, and I realized—
Tariq is the weakest link. Whatever happened, he’s the one I can get the truth out of. The one who will help me destroy all three of them.
Inside, a small circle of boys and girls played poker. I sat down beside them and watched their faces. Watched the emotions they were feeling, and how they tried to hide them. How they failed.
“Deal me in?” I asked, unsure if that sentence was even a real thing people said.
Here is a helpful hint: even if you’ve never played poker in your life, even if you don’t know the rules, you can be really really good at poker if you can practically read minds. Which is how I earned a hundred dollars in small bills and the respect and semi-frightened awe of a slowly growing circle of soccer players and kids I’d never seen before.
Including Bastien, who clapped me on the back and said, “Damn, son!” at several points, and Ott, who grunted after I won a particularly impressive hand, which was the nicest noise he’d ever made at me.
“Hungry?” Tariq asked, evidently forgetting what I’d said when he asked me that same question an hour or so ago. Already his eyes were strange and feral, his expression distant and distorted. Alcohol was turning him into something else. Something that made mistakes; something I could manipulate. He stooped to pick up a pan someone was using to cook meat over the fire. The alcohol and the firelight made him look brutal, monstrous.
“Um, sure,” I said. If I wanted to gain his confidence, yes was most assuredly better than no. I reached my hand out and grabbed a sausage. Molten-hot hog fat scalded my fingertips, dripped down to pool in my palm. When Tariq wasn’t looking I let the sausage fall to the earth, and whispered a tiny prayer of apology to that pig who died for nothing.