Chapter Six
He wakes up the next morning disoriented and aroused. It takes a few lengthy seconds to figure out that he is in the living room. He sits up and pulls the blanket around him, peers across the room so that he can see the clock over the dining room table. 8:15. No one woke him up, maybe they really don’t care if he goes to school or not. The sky is pale and bright through the crack in the living room curtains. A crow caws outside. A flash of a dream image comes to him: he is running past a house with a broken front porch toward a swimming pool with no water; he slides down into the deep end and talks to a boy—it was Scott, that kid from gym class in the van last night. What happened? His dick is half hard, and the dream of Scott is part of that. He leans back into the couch and closes his eyes again, trying in vain to remember more.
He shakes his head, loosens a few long strands of hair stuck to his face. The dream is gone except for the picture of Scott. He reaches down and puts his fingertips on his underwear, squeezes his butt muscles so that his dick bobs against the fabric. A couple of seconds of this—bob, bob, bob—and he stops, not wanting to be caught touching himself in the middle of the living room.
Upstairs, Ruby is stepping out of the bathroom. She’s wearing a dark dress he hasn’t seen on her since some night they all went out to a restaurant, probably six months ago.
“Are you going to school?” he asks her.
“No. Mom said I don’t have to.”
Robin’s bedroom door opens and Nana Rena emerges, sliding a coat over one of her familiar dresses. “If it isn’t Rip Van Winkle,” she says.
“How come no one woke me up?” Robin asks. “Where’s Mom?”
“Your mother was poking and prodding every ten minutes with not a blink out of you; I would have thought you were dead and buri—” She flinches and cuts herself off with a wave of her hand. Robin bites on his lower lip at the word dead and at the blush on Nana’s cheeks after she caught herself saying it. Dead is not a word he thinks anyone is going to throw around in a joking way right now. Nana says, “Your mother is at the hospital. Your father is taking us to eight-thirty mass. Come on, Ruby. The house of the Lord awaits.”
As they walk down the stairs, he hears Ruby saying, “I don’t wanna sit on the side with the bloody Jesus on the wall.”
He slips into one of his favorite shirts—shiny and synthetic, with photos of a Parisian cafe repeated across the material—and a pair of white pants that look like jeans even though they are made of polyester. At the last minute he removes the pants long enough to take off his underwear; when he puts them back on, he studies the way the shape of his dick reveals itself under the fabric. Before he can debate whether or not this is OK, or why he’s even thought of it today of all days, he grabs his Trapper Keeper binder and East of Eden and heads downstairs.
His father stops him in the kitchen as he moves toward the back door. “I’m gonna go with Victoria,” Robin tells him. He checks the clock in the shape of a teakettle over the table. 8:25. “She might have already left. I should hurry up.”
Clark runs a hand through his hair. “I guess I should write you a note about yesterday.” He slides his hand across the countertop, searching out a pen. He pulls a piece of letterhead from the junk drawer under the dishrack and chews on the pen before writing. “Your mother usually does this,” he says as he writes. He crosses out a word or two and then finishes with the jagged scrawl of his signature.
“Thanks,” Robin says, folding it in half.
“I’ll see you this evening. Maybe I’ll take you over to the hospital tonight.” He holds Robin’s stare and looks away, unsure. “We’ll see.”
“Great,” Robin says, trying to sound appreciative but unable to read his father’s expression—is Clark trying to say he’s sorry for exploding last night, or is he still laying down the law, making sure Robin knows who’s making these decisions?
Robin crosses through the hedge to the Spicers’. Victoria is walking out her back door as he gets there. He feels as if he hasn’t seen her for weeks though it’s only been a couple of days. He’s wondering if it is possible she doesn’t know about Jackson, but then she holds open her arms. “Oh, my God,” she whimpers, pulling him into a hug. “I can’t believe it.” He wants to feel comforted by this but his books are poking into his ribs, so he pulls away. “You should have called me,” Victoria says, “Why didn’t you call me?”
He can’t quite formulate an answer, can’t explain to her that he couldn’t tell anyone about Jackson’s fall without feeling like he’d be setting up evidence against himself.
A horn honks. “Your mom won’t mind taking me, right?” Robin asks.
“My mom’s sick. I’m getting a ride from Ethan—you know, Todd’s friend?” She puffs out her cheeks, an indication of how fat Ethan is, and smiles. Robin smiles back, glad to share the joke. She curls her hair over her ear. Her fingernails are painted pale blue. “C’mon,” she says. “Hopefully it won’t be too disgusting.”
A smooth blue Chevy Malibu sits in the middle of the street. Ethan, in a denim jacket with a Harley Davidson logo on the sleeve, leans into the horn when he sees them.
“Cut the horn action!” Victoria barks. “My mother will kill you if the neighbors start complaining.”
“Who’s the dweeb?” Ethan asks, catching sight of Robin. Robin swallows but his mouth is dry. “Groovy shirt,” Ethan says sarcastically.
“If you don’t have anything nice to say,” Victoria says, “stuff a Twinkie in your mouth.”
Todd’s head pops out above the roof of the car. “Hey, Robin,” he calls out. “Big surprise.”
“I couldn’t get a ride from my father,” he lies. He moves his books in front of his crotch, suddenly self-conscious about his underwear-free bulge.
“Get in, get in,” Todd says calmly, jumping down to the street, his brown workboots slapping flat against the pavement.
“Man, we gotta book,” Ethan says impatiently.
Todd holds open the back door and waves Robin toward it.
“What are you being so nice about?” Victoria asks suspiciously.
Todd goofs up his mouth. “I’m just a little crazy sometimes. I get the urge to act nice. You ought to try it some time. You’ll live longer if you’re a nicer person.”
“In that case you’ll probably be dead before you finish high school.”
Robin smiles at Todd’s silly expression and slides in. Victoria follows and Todd slams the door forcefully behind her, squishing his face against her window and crossing his eyes grotesquely.
“In case you didn’t notice,” Victoria says in a bored tone of voice, “I’m ignoring you.”
Todd gets in the front seat and the car peels out, throwing Robin into the side door.
“Don’t speed,” Victoria says. She turns to Robin. “What’s the scoop with your baby bro?”
Todd turns his head to listen, and Robin catches the attentiveness in his eyes before looking down at his books. “You know, he got fucked up,” he says, trying to formulate his answer in Todd’s language.
“My mother heard it from Mrs. Delatore yesterday,” Victoria says. “So is his neck broken? I mean, that’s what she said.”
“Hey, are you that kid who pushed his brother off the slide?” Ethan says excitedly.
Robin feels his face drain of blood. “Who said that?”
“Man, you are about as dumb as you are fat,” Todd says.
Ethan slams on the brakes. “You wanna walk?”
Robin gets thrown forward, and his father’s note slips off the top of his binder.
“What’s that?” Victoria asks, scooping it up and reading it out loud.
“‘To whom it may concern—’ God, doesn’t he even know your teacher’s name? ‘Robin MacKenzie missed school yesterday because of a sudden, unfortunate situation at home. Please excuse him from classes. I can provide details if necessary.’ Aren’t there two c’s in necessary?”
“No,” Todd says and pulls the paper from her hand. “His name’s printed on the top. ‘Clark MacKenzie, Sales Analyst.’ Mighty professional don’t ya think?” Robin smirks—professional coming from Todd sounds like another word for boring. Todd hands him back the note and says, “He started to write ‘tragic,’ then crossed it out and wrote ‘unfortunate.’”
“Jackson fell,” Robin murmurs quietly, folding the note small enough to slide into his back pocket. “It was an accident.”
Todd lights a cigarette and blows smoke out his open window. Robin watches the gesture, the way Todd’s neck tenses when he sucks in, the way his lips keep the cigarette in place even as it looks like it might drop from his mouth.
“I heard he had an operation and he’s in a coma,” Victoria says, her voice sounding gossipy to Robin.
“He’s not in a coma,” he responds testily, though he wonders what a coma really looks like. Jackson in the bed last night, with those tubes and machines—maybe that was a coma. Wouldn’t his parents have described it that way, though? Or is that one of the “details” his father will provide only “if necessary?”
“Well, can he talk?” Victoria asks.
“I don’t think so,” Robin says. “I mean, he’s ... I don’t know.” He isn’t sure how to compress the information he has. He bites on the inside of his lip, understanding that no one has made the situation completely clear to him. “He’s fucked up, that’s all.”
“Bummer,” Todd says.
Ethan interrupts. “Hey, Spicer, you think we have time for doobage before homeroom?”
“Always time for that.”
“Do you two have to flaunt what major delinquents you are in front of Robin?” Victoria says.
“Robin’s cool,” Todd says, smiling at him. “Right?”
“Sure,” Robin says, pleased at the sound of it. Cool. “Hey, can I have a cigarette?”
“I can’t believe you,” Victoria protests. “I don’t see you for like two days and now you’re smoking.”
“I smoke my mother’s cigarettes,” Robin says defensively.
Todd brings another cigarette to his mouth and lights it, passing it across the back seat. Robin’s hand shakes as he takes it from Todd, meeting his stare. Todd’s eyes: brown with pumpkin-gold flecks inside. He puts the filter to his lips, feels the trace of spit on the end, like with the roach at the drive-in. He remembers last night in the van with Scott and makes sure to blow out quickly enough to avoid burning his throat.
“Thanks,” he says to Todd. Even a simple word is a struggle with so much concentration on not coughing.
“Anything I can do to corrupt the youth of America.” Todd winks at him before turning his eyes back to the front seat. He reaches to the dashboard and pops in an eight track. A romantic rock piano spills from the speakers.
“Bruuuuce!” Ethan howls. “Jersey’s own.”
“I never get sick of this,” Todd says.
Robin takes a few more puffs, not really liking the taste but liking the moment: the hungry sound of Springsteen’s voice, Todd’s lips moving with the music, the controlled sway in Todd’s shoulders.
When they pull up in front of the school, Robin slides out of the seat after Victoria.
“Thanks for nothing,” Victoria says, striding away.
“Ah, you can walk next time,” Ethan shouts after her.
“There won’t be a next time,” she calls back.
Robin raises his eyebrows at Todd. “See ya.”
Todd leans out the window to him. “You know, what happened to your brother ...” His voice fades out as he exhales a stream of smoke. “If I was you, I’d just not think about it. It’s too heavy, you know. You should get your mind off it—blast some music, get wasted.” He pauses and raises his eyebrows. “Get laid.”
“Yeah, sure, thanks,” Robin sputters, trying to remain cool even as a blush rises in his neck and cheeks.
Todd nods intently at him. “Anytime.” He flicks his cigarette out the window, then shakes another one from his pack of Marlboros and hands it to Robin. Robin stamps the first one out and puts the new one over his ear.
“You know, if I was you, I wouldn’t even go in that place,” Todd says with a look toward the school. Then he says, “Later,” and Robin mouths back, “Yeah, later.”
Ethan hits the gas and the car roars away. Robin stands in the smell of scorched rubber, trying to understand Todd’s attention, fighting back the notion that Todd is actually his friend now, because how could that possibly be true after so many years of torment?
The morning crowd is noisy with chatter; Led Zeppelin blares from a radio. Robin catches a glimpse of a short guy in a baseball cap moving through the crowd toward the courtyard. Scott. He feels a nervous clutch in his stomach; an image from his dream last night—with Scott at the empty swimming pool—rears up in front of him. He thinks about trying to catch up with him—surprised at how much he’d rather be with Scott than Victoria at this moment—but a glance at the big clock on the face of the building reminds him it’s almost time for homeroom.
“Are you coming?” Victoria calls to him. He runs to catch up with her. “God,” she says, “my brother is so mental around you.”
He pretends to shrug off her comment. “Todd was probably just making fun of me because he knows I don’t know how to get high.”
“God, what’s he trying to prove anyway? I mean, you’re my friend, not his.” Victoria stops suddenly and looks at him. “But you play right into it, Robin.”
Robin turns away from her penetrating gaze. “I do not.”
“I can’t believe you even like him.”
“You just don’t like him because he’s your brother. I mean, Ruby and I are always bothering each other.”
“Oh, my God,” Victoria gasps, her mouth hanging open. “How is Ruby?”
Robin shrugs—he doesn’t want to think about the state his sister is in: she’s sketching psychotic pictures one day and racing off to church the next. He sees Ruby and Nana kneeling in the pew at St. Bart’s: Ruby in her fancy dress, her skinny knees pressed into the plastic-covered footrest, her eyes searching the rafters for Jackson’s guardian angel; Nana next to her, her body twice as wide, eyes closed, lips floating over mumbled prayers, rosary beads spilling from her thick fingers. Looking around the crowded school lawn now—kids hanging out, acting cool, pushing past each other, pushing into each other—Robin is bothered by the idea of his sister and grandmother in church, because maybe he should be there too, acting serious and holy, trying to convince God, whoever He is, that Jackson deserves to get better quick. “I guess she’s OK,” he says to Victoria.
“She must be so freaked out. She’s the type that would probably feel guilty,” Victoria says. “I bet she didn’t go to school today, right?”
Robin hears something in Victoria’s voice, sees something in her stance, the way she balances her books on her hip, the way she’s twisting her lip as if she’s suddenly condemning him for not being upset enough, or something—all of it makes him mad. “You don’t know anything,” he growls, and walks past her to the front doors.
“Where are you going?” Victoria demands. “What’s your deal?”
Robin doesn’t answer. He moves against the crowd, bumping and pushing his way in, wishing he’d chased after Scott when he’d had the chance.
He swings open the stained wooden door and the locker room explodes into his senses: boys’ bodies lit from single bulbs on the concrete ceiling, the smell of armpits, sneakers and disinfectant, voices rising and falling between the vibrations of slamming steel. Robin makes his way to his own locker, past Seth Carter pulling his red gym shirt over his head. Robin nods but Seth just looks at him blankly and lets him by. Ever since he jerked off at the Ice Pond thinking about Seth’s pissing contest, he’s been nervous in Seth’s presence, as if his imagination was flickering in his eyes like a dirty movie on a screen.
Robin sits on the bench, a heavy pile of books in his lap, trying to remember the combination to his lock. He looks up at the clock—11:30. Most of the day still ahead. He shouldn’t have come to school. Every class so far has been a blur, no clearer than a dream. In English they were discussing East of Eden and he couldn’t even follow the questions Mrs. Tadesci was asking. She’d lectured about symbolism, about Cain and Abel and the book of Genesis—what did that have to do with James Dean?
He is fumbling with the numbers on the lock when he senses someone standing nearby. He looks up; it’s Scott. Again, a snapshot of last night’s dream forms—he and Scott squeezing together through a doorway—and disappears.
“What’s going on with your brother?” Scott asks, bouncing on the toes of his Keds. His pants, which are too long, bunch up on the floor at his heels.
Robin feels a surprising flutter in his belly and looks away.
“Not too good, huh?” Scott asks.
“No. He looked really fucked up.” Suddenly the details are pouring out of him. “He was hooked up to these machines and it made me think he was like Frankenstein or something, some kind of experiment. I mean, I knew it would look bad but then when I got there it was even worse and then my parents were mad at me because of me taking my bike there after they told me to stay home—”
Scott steps closer and interrupts. “I’m ditching. Pintack’s outside setting up hurdles on the track. My fucking favorite.”
“Yeah, right?” Robin groans. Last time they ran track, he could barely keep one foot in front of the other, worrying that he was running too much like a girl. “Where are you gonna go?”
“Town,” Scott says. “Maybe to The Bird after that.”
The Bird is the county park on the other side of Five Corners, at the end of Greenlawn Avenue. The name is short for “bird sanctuary;” once upon a time there was an aviary there, though the building has been empty for years. It’s a place like the Ice Pond where teenage things are supposed to happen, a place Robin has never dared to go. “How are you getting there?”
“I dunno. Hitch, maybe.”
Hitchhiking is another thing he’s never done, another thing he’s been too scared to do. He mutters, “Cool.”
“So you wanna come?”
“Is anyone else going with you?”
“Fuck no. I’m pretty much a lone wolf, you know?”
The expression makes Robin smile—he thinks of Call of the Wild, of Scott traveling through the Arctic, beyond the bounds of civilization. “I probably shouldn’t ditch,” he says.
Scott looks disappointed for a moment, then seems to cover it up. “Never mind,” he says. “I gotta hit it before Pintack starts tooting his fucking whistle.” He stands for another second, shifting his weight back and forth on his legs, his darting eyes hinting at the promise of escape.
From the next row Robin hears someone bragging about getting a blow job. He recognizes the deep voice—the infamous Long Dong Danniman. A voice responds, “I’d never kiss a chick who just had my dick in her mouth. No way.” Another voice: “Ah, you probably suck your own.” “Faggot.” “Cocksucker.” Jittery laughter.
“Man, I’m getting outta here,” Scott says.
“Hold on,” Robin says. “I’m coming. I got a cigarette I want to smoke anyway.” He grabs the lock and spins the dial around—he remembers: 32, 8, 17. He feels a jolt of energy as he drops his books inside and clicks the door shut. Scott is in front of a mirror, his baseball cap pinched between his legs, running a long-handled comb through his hair. He watches Scott’s shoulder bones rise and fall beneath a David Bowie concert T-shirt and a loose, unzipped sweat jacket; he lets his eyes drift to the curve of his ass inside tight, worn-down jeans. He sucks in his breath, tries to let his face slide into the same tough expression Scott wears so effortlessly.
They reach the door at the same time as the group of guys from the next row. “Man, I’m telling you, you gotta get some head,” Long Dong Danniman is saying. Seth Carter, standing next to him, says, “Yeah, sure. The chicks’re just knocking down my fucking door.” Robin starts to step past Danniman and his friends, but Scott grabs his arm to let them go first.
Danniman gives Robin a withering look. “Nice shirt, girlie.”
“Shut up,” Robin whispers.
“Hey, girlie, you wanna give Seth someone to practice on?” Danniman teases, punching Seth in the arm.
“He’s not my type,” Robin mutters. The circle of boys seems to tighten around him.
“I guess she’s shy,” Danniman says and pushes Seth into Robin.
Robin and Seth shove each other away. Robin steps back into the wall.
“Cut the shit, man,” Seth whines.
“Ah, you’d just be a snack anyway,” Danniman says to Seth. He grabs his crotch and shakes his bulging red gym shorts at Robin. “This girlie probably wants a meal.”
“Fuck you,” Robin hisses, looking from Danniman’s crotch to his eyes. Danniman takes a step closer to him, and then Scott steps in.
“Hey, man, he’s cool. Just take a pill,” Scott says. Robin is amazed as they all back away. Even though Scott looks like the runt of the litter, they listen to him. It’s that face again, Robin thinks. There’s something about Scott’s face that tells you not to cross the line with him. There’s something there no one wants to know too much about.
The gang moves past. Scott waits for the last of them to go before moving toward the door himself. “Come on, man. Are you coming or what?”
Robin follows him past the red-and-white Exit sign, away from the gymnasium, the squawking of sneakers on polished wood, the cacophony of boys’ voices. It is only when he gets into the parking lot and he can breathe the outdoor air that he realizes his body has been trembling from the contact. He’s never said, “Fuck you,” to a bully before, and he’s wondering if Scott’s presence emboldened him, even before Scott stepped to his defense. Is this what it means to have a guy like Scott as a friend, that he might be able to avoid the traps set by guys like Danniman?
As he runs to catch up with Scott, away from school, away from the proscribed schedule of his life, he gets the sense that he is actually running toward something—toward something new, something risky.
“Don’t you worry about some maniac picking you up?” Robin asks. Scott is walking backward, sticking his thumb out as cars approach.
“What could happen?” They are at the side of Hooper Avenue, beyond the point where the sidewalk ends in a trail of dirt and dead leaves, where the houses and lawns give way to oak and pine trees and the air is quiet and the sky is stretched wide through the branches ahead of them.
“What about murderers and those kind of people?”
Scott laughs. “I think you’re paranoid, man.”
“I read in Time magazine a story about serial killers.” He snaps twigs beneath his shoes. “They always show up in small towns. You never hear about it in big cities. The more people around, the safer.”
Scott shoots Robin a look of disbelief. “What about Son of Sam?”
“He’s an exception.”
“The Boston Strangler. Charles Manson?”
“What’s your point, Scott?”
“All you ever hear about in cities is fucking crime. Especially New York. My father got mugged in New York last year. A couple of black guys with a fucking tool.” He makes his thumb and forefinger into a gun and points it into Robin’s chest.
“People in New Jersey always think New York is full of crime,” Robin says knowingly. He folds Scott’s index finger back toward him, surprising himself with the touch. “You just have to act like you belong. If you look like some stooge from New Jersey of course they’re going to pick you out. New Yorkers are cool—really cool, not like New Jersey cool. Do you think Danniman would last ten minutes in New York without everyone knowing he wasn’t some bridge-and-tunnel loser?”
Scott shrugs. “What makes you such an expert? You’re a bridge-and-tunnel loser, too.”
“For your information, I was born in New York, and I’m going to live there again someday. Plus, I go there all the time with my mother. She takes me to the theater and to museums and—” He pauses; Scott looks dubious.
“She ever take you to CBGB?” he challenges.
Robin frowns. “Oh, right. Like my mother’s going to bring me to a rock music place on the Bowery.”
Scott shrugs. “At least you know what it is. That’s where I’d want to go, not to some stupid museum with my mother.” He searches the road for cars, spits when he doesn’t see anything. “ ’Course, my mother doesn’t get out much.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing,” he says quickly.
“She doesn’t have a job?”
“She’s just ... she’s kind of sick, so she’s in a hospital.”
“What kind of sick?” Robin asks.
Scott loops his finger next to his head, indicating craziness. Robin stops in his tracks, unsure if Scott is being truthful. Scott sees his quizzical look and turns away. “Never mind—forget I mentioned it.”
A maroon Galaxie 500 convertible approaches and Scott sticks his thumb back out. The driver is a girl with a head of frizzy, mousy blond hair bouncing in the wind. She catches sight of them and hits the brakes. She is wearing sunglasses even though the sky is gray. “Don’t you boys know that hitchhiking is against the law?”
Robin shrinks back but Scott stands firm, planting his hitchhiking hand in his front pocket. “What are you, a cop?” he challenges.
The girl laughs. She’s maybe 21 or 22, and Robin thinks he has seen her before. Her lipstick is deep purple against frosty-white skin, and her fingers, curled around the steering wheel, taper to matching dabs of color at the nails. “A cop? Please. If you insult me like that there’s no way you’re getting a ride,” she says. Her scoop-neck pink T-shirt reads Foxy Lady across the chest.
Scott turns away, as if he can’t be bothered with negotiations, but Robin steps forward. “Can you take us into town?” he asks.
“Get in, boys.”
The air is cold against their faces, and the car speakers roar with the kind of funky music he hears coming from the black kids’ radios in the cafeteria. Robin taps his fingers on his knees. “What’s the name of this group?” he asks her, as one song fades out.
“It’s Parliament,” she says, as if everyone should know this.
He remembers where he has seen her before—the music store in town. “You work at New Sounds, don’t you?”
She pulls her glasses down and peers at him studiously. “Are you the kid always buying the Broadway records?”
“Yeah! That’s me. I bought The King and I, West Side Story and Cabaret. But I haven’t been in there for a while.”
She breaks out into a big smile.
“We had a nickname for you. Broadway Baby.”
Scott busts out laughing from the backseat. “Broadway Baby. That’s a pisser!”
Robin turns around and glares at him. “I like other music, too.” “Like what?”
“I like disco.”
The girl tugs on the sleeve of his shimmery shirt. “I could have guessed that,” she says.
Scott is still laughing. Robin adds, “And I like some rock, too.”
Scott puts his face in his hands. “Man, no one likes rock and disco.”
“And show tunes,” the girl says. “You like it all, huh?”
Robin squints his eyes at Scott. “I have a lot of interests. The problem with you is you haven’t seen enough of the world to have an open mind.” He hears his mother’s voice in his words but he’s glad it’s there. He doesn’t need this hassle from Scott.
“What do you know about my mind? You don’t even know me,” Scott says.
“Yeah, well, maybe I don’t want to,” Robin says. “You don’t know me either.”
“That’s what you think,” Scott mumbles.
“What’d you say?”
“I know more about you than you think.” Scott closes his eyes and leans his head back against the vinyl upholstery.
Robin waits for more, wondering if Scott is bluffing or getting at something. Robin pulls the cigarette Todd gave him out of his shirt pocket and fingers it like a talisman. Scott remains silent, his silence like a little punishment. The problem with taking risks, Robin realizes, is that you don’t know what you’re getting into.
“I would have thought you two were bosom buddies,” the girl says. She presses in the cigarette lighter. With a glance at her purse lying on the seat, she says to Robin, “Pull one out for me.”
He finds a pack marked Eve in scripted letters; the cigarettes are longer and skinnier than the one he got from Todd. “These are neat,” he says.
Scott speaks up again. “Bosom buddies. Yeah, right. We’re just two rejects from gym class.”
“Yeah,” Robin says. “Broadway Baby and Baby Burnout.” The lighter pops out and he brings it to the cigarette, which is hanging from his lips in as close an imitation of Todd Spicer as he can pull off. He coughs at the puff and turns around to pass it to Scott.
Scott leans forward and takes it from him. “Yeah, a couple of rejects,” he repeats, smoke disappearing from his mouth into the wind racing past. He hands the cigarette back. “Man, don’t pay any attention to me, OK? I’m just goofin’ on ya.”
Robin studies Scott’s face. The apology seems real enough, but how can he be sure? He sighs and takes another drag. Each one gets easier. He feels Scott’s knees pushing into the seat under his back and leans back into it. Maybe Scott is just some closed-minded kid he can never be friends with. But maybe not. :
He watches the blur of trees at the side of road. His hair flies back. He feels exposed in this convertible, his decision to ditch announced to all of Greenlawn. He closes his eyes. I’m leaving Greenlawn, he thinks. I’m on a magic carpet, and I don’t know where I’m going.
“I think I’m stoned,” Robin says.
Scott laughs.
“No, I really think I’m stoned.” Every time he turns his head, his thoughts need another moment to follow, as if his mind is having trouble keeping up. They are sitting on a concrete loft in the abandoned aviary at The Bird; Robin imagines that they’re hiding in a spooky outlying building on a big estate, something in one of those British novels from a hundred years ago. The room is damp and shadowy. Metal bars line the walls below them, and all around lay stacks of cages, their sides bent and smashed by years of vandalism. The roof above them slants to a peak twenty feet above the floor. All of the windows are boarded up except for the one they climbed through after Scott bought the joint from a kid in the parking lot. The place is big enough to echo their conversation, but the air is thick with a dank, animal odor and the marijuana smoke they’ve been exhaling for the past ten minutes. Their feet dangle off the edge of the loft. He looks down past his feet at white birdshit splotches. The more of Scott’s pot that he smokes, the more Robin considers moving back into the safety of a corner.
“How do you know when you’re stoned?” Robin asks. “Is it when the way you usually think isn’t the way you’re thinking right now?”
Scott narrows his eyes at Robin, ruminating. Robin waits, expecting Scott to say something authoritative, and when what seems like ten minutes pass and still no sound comes out of him, they both bust out laughing. “That’s so funny,” Robin says. “How you didn’t give me an answer, and I was waiting for one. That’s the way everyone in the whole world always seems to me—I ask a question and I don’t get an answer.”
“You can’t be stoned,” Scott says. “No one gets stoned the first time they smoke.”
“Did you?” Robin asks.
“Yes,” Scott says, and breaks into laughter again.
They lie on their backs and stare at the rotting wood beams stretched across the ceiling. Robin is talking. He has been telling Scott everything about the accident, from Jackson baiting him into climbing up the slide, to his father’s explosive anger in the hospital room, to Victoria’s gossipy questions in the car. Scott is tapping his fingers on his stomach—his shirt pulled up from his waist—and the delicate patter of flesh against flesh, repeating itself throughout the story, provides a hypnotic beat beneath Robin’s words. Scott interrupts every now and then to ask a question that only needs a yes or no answer but which sends Robin off into a fresh rush of revelation. When Scott asks, “So Jackson is younger than Ruby?” Robin tells him how Jackson is the only one of the three of them born in New Jersey, how Jackson stopped playing with him and Ruby when they were little, how he still likes Ruby better than Jackson even though she’s been acting so religious lately. When Scott says, “You mean your father never hits you?” Robin explains how his father lets him go off with his mother to the city and never seems to care though Robin knows—he just knows—that his father doesn’t like it. When Scott asks him who Uncle Stan is, Robin tells him about the World Series party, and how he thinks Stan drove his mother to drunkenness, and how Robin was stuck with Larry that night. He takes another hit off the joint and tells Scott about Larry running around naked and wagging his dick at him and how that bothered him because Larry was the one who was perverted but he wound up making Robin feel that way.
And then he gets quiet, having reached the stifling moment when he realizes that he’s revealed more than he ever planned. Scott stops his tapping. The skylight on the other side of the roof is darker than when they got here, and it occurs to Robin that he’s ditched more than just gym class. The hours he has spent with Scott lay themselves out like a chain, one link after the other, stretched long against the sky. “I should probably shut up for a while,” he says, worried now that Scott has heard too much, that he could not possibly want to spend any more time with him.
“No, man, it’s cool. I been listening.”
“I probably sound like a big crybaby—”
“Nah.”
“—or worse.”
“I can tell you’re pretty smart,” Scott says. “I knew you were a brain. But I mean you have a way of thinking of things that’s pretty fucking heavy.” He rolls over on his stomach and reaches across Robin, who tenses up from the nearness. “Where’s the roach, man? I want to get my money’s worth.” His hand brushes the ground at Robin’s side.
The roach is still pressed between Robin’s fingers; he lifts it into the air with a flourish. “Ta-da.”
Scott lights a match and holds the flame near his face, waiting. Robin understands after a moment what to do: he lifts the roach to Scott’s lips, surprised how steady he holds it, watching the concentration as Scott pulls in the smoke. The end of the joint is a tiny star burning orange, and Scott’s face glows softly behind it.
Robin thinks Scott will move away from him, but he doesn’t. In the closeness, Robin wonders what it would be like to kiss Scott, and then he hears himself wondering this and stamps out the thought. “You said something before, in the car—” His memories of the morning race to catch up with his words. “You said you knew things about me.”
“I hung out in your neighborhood before.”
“With who?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“I’ve never seen you in my neighborhood. Only in gym,” Robin says. “You’re like the only other kid who isn’t into it. I mean, I didn’t know you were a burnout but I knew there was something about you, different.”
“That’s right,” Scott says. “I told you, I’m a lone wolf.” He takes another puff.
“So how come I get all the shit from guys like Danniman and you don’t?” Robin asks him. “Is it because of your face?”
“What the fuck’s wrong with my face?”
“Nothing,” Robin says quickly. “I mean, there’s this expression you have.”
“You are high, man. Danniman and those other guys won’t fuck with me ’cause I sell them joints.”
Robin stares in amazement. “You do? You deal?”
Scott smiles, almost with pride. “Sure. I buy it from upperclassmen at school for like fifty cents, or at The Bird—like that guy Socks I just scored from in the parking lot? Then I sell it back to Danniman or whoever for seventy-five cents or a dollar.”
“Wow. Don’t you worry about—”
“What? You’re too uptight about that stuff.”
“It could happen,” Robin says defensively.
“Even if I got caught, what would happen? The state could take me away from my father for him being a bad parent, which would not fucking bother me one bit. I’d get set up with some rich family. Like yours.”
Robin rolls his head to the side. “Yeah, right, we’re just dripping with money. ”
“You got two cars in your driveway.”
“How do you know?”
“You gotta have some household cash to have two. There’s a gas shortage going on, man.”
“You hung out in my neighborhood?” Robin tries to concentrate on the notion of Scott on Bergen Avenue, close enough to know how many cars his family has. He weaves his fingers into his hair, lifting, then letting it drop back against his ears. In the swimming-through-water of the high, words feel increasingly clumsy, but his gestures leave him fluttery, feeling almost graceful.
When he turns his head back to Scott, he sees that Scott has been watching him intently.
“You know, I don’t need anybody anyway.” Scott has lowered his voice, narrowed his eyes. “A lone wolf doesn’t travel with the pack.” He bends his head back and howls into the room. The sound collects in the eaves and returns to them, vibrating. Scott keeps his head back and Robin’s skin shivers. He thinks it again: I want to kiss Scott, right there on the neck. There’s a gauzy dreaminess to the wish that offers a split second of peace before giving way to pure, immobilizing panic.
“Yeah, it’s true,” Scott says. “I’ve been spying on you.” He growls, then whips his head forward. Robin falls back to the concrete, trying to make the roof stop spinning, certain that Scott knows what he’s thinking.
Without warning, Scott lifts one leg and throws it across him. Robin stifles a gasp as Scott sits down on his thighs, just below his crotch. “I’m the stoned lone wolf and I’m stalking through the jungle.” He lowers his head again, his hair sways across Robin’s chest. “The lone wolf spots a robin in the birdhouse and gets ideas.”
Robin’s dick is like a finger pushing almost painfully against his hip. He thinks maybe Scott can feel it, too. He thinks maybe Scott doesn’t mind but he can’t believe that, even with Scott’s legs clamped against his, Scott’s head bobbing dreamily in front of him, Scott’s breath giving off heat against his shirt.
Scott growls again. He grabs Robin’s arms and extends them over Robin’s head. “The stoned wolf,” he whispers. Robin stiffens from his head to his heels. The tremor of Scott’s growling voice moves along Robin’s body, into his shoulder, up against his neck—Scott’s lips are on his neck, then off again, the growl moving against Robin’s jawbone, his ear. Scott has caught him by surprise; a shaking has started in his legs and is moving up through his chest, into his throat, his lips. His body trills against the concrete. And then Scott is pushing against him, Scott’s legs on top of his legs, Scott’s crotch pressing his, Scott’s boner prodding through his jeans into Robin. Scott’s hair falls across Robin’s lips. Robin lifts his head, opens his mouth to protest, and then Scott’s lips are right there against his, and it all becomes clear to Robin: what he’d been wanting just moments ago is actually happening.
Robin raises his face and then, unsure what to do, bites Scott’s lower lip. Scott’s lips part, his mouth is a puddle of spit, their mouths are pressing wet into each other, tongues moving, circling, slippery, sloppy. Robin rushes the slick end of his tongue across Scott’s, can feel the roughness of taste buds. Their breathing mixes up together, puffs of effort, Robin unable to tell what noise is his and what is Scott’s. A chorus of Oh my God oh my God bellows in his skull. He hears a warning—Someone will see us—then he hears Todd’s voice from that morning saying, Get laid. He pushes up and tastes Scott’s smoky spit and he wants to tell Scott each of these thoughts, he wants Scott to say something back.
Scott pulls out of the kiss and slams harder into his crotch. Robin thrusts back and Scott pounds at him again, it’s almost painful to Robin but he pushes back over and over until he is just counting the beats of this rhythm like a crude children’s song—bum-bah-bum-bah-bum—for-getting about the voices in his head and what he wants to say, just trying to do whatever Scott is doing—for how long they do this, he doesn’t know. The whole world is just the press of Scott against him and him trying to keep up. And then without warning the sound from Scott’s mouth is not a growl but a gasp and his teeth clamp down on his lower lip. He stretches out, flat as an iron. Everything freezes.
Robin sucks in his breath as all of the tension from Scott’s body disappears.
Scott collapses, then rolls off him. A slice of air hits Robin’s knees, crotch, stomach, chest, neck—everywhere Scott was and now isn’t.
In and out, quick, shallow, Robin’s breath is all stunned gasping. He opens his eyes to a vast room deep in shadow and stinking like sour breath. His body is still shaking.
“I shot,” Scott says.
“What?” Robin leans toward him, sees Scott lying on his back with his arm across his eyes.
“Did you?” Scott asks.
“Did I what?”
Scott peeks out from under his arm. He reaches his other hand out and pokes it into Robin’s crotch as if he’s testing a loaf of bread. “Did you come, man?”
Robin sticks his hand down his pants. The tip of his dick is sticky with goo but it’s not the whole thing. He looks at Scott’s lap, at the dark stain there. “No.”
“Shit. I sure fucking did.”
Robin doesn’t know what to do. Is it over? He wants to kiss Scott again but Scott is sitting up now, unzipping his fly. His half-swollen dick flops out like a few inches of garden hose, hairs tangled in the glop. No underwear. He wipes himself with the hem of his T-shirt.
Robin presses his hand on his dick. He watches Scott trying to clean up. “Wow,” Scott says, looking at him with a wide grin. “I really shot.”
“Yeah,” is all Robin can say. Is there something wrong with him for not shooting yet? Should he jerk it off right now or would Scott think that’s too weird?
Scott looks around the room, then back at Robin’s crotch. “Hurry up, man. We could get snagged or something.”
Robin keeps pulling on it but each stroke feels less effective, not quite right, and not all like the feeling of a few minutes ago when he could feel Scott’s breath on him. He tries to read Scott’s face, tries to figure out what Scott thinks of him here with his unfinished business.
“Put out your hand,” Scott says.
“What?”
“Give me your hand.” Robin takes his hand off his dick and holds it toward Scott. Scott flips it over and spits into his palm. He raises his eyebrows. “Use that,” he says. “I’ll meet you outside. I don’t want to get busted in here.” And then he’s scurrying over the edge of the loft, lowering himself from sight.
With Scott gone, the spell is broken, the plug pulled. A final silent shudder travels across his skin, and he shakes himself to be rid of it. A bead of sweat runs from his temple. His dick is going soft. He rubs his hand on the concrete, smearing Scott’s spit. In the webby part between each finger, the smell is like lemon juice or spinach, like Scott’s breath and his own spit and the herby trace of what they smoked. He listens as Scott’s footsteps fade away. They were not caught. No one knows but him and Scott. He looks around for some evidence of what they did; nothing remains except a mucusy drop of Scott’s goop on the floor.
The night air is cold, the sky silver. Scott stands, hands in pockets, at the edge of the creek running past the picnic tables. Robin approaches cautiously.
Scott looks at him, then away. “I got really fucked up on that weed,” he says.
The water trickles quietly by. Scott picks up a rock and tosses it in. Plink. Robin leans back against an oak tree, rubs his sticky hand on the bark, which breaks apart like chalk. He shakes his hair, lets the faint breeze soothe him. His lips tingle. “I never did that before,” he says quietly.
“That’s cool,” Scott says, still not looking at him.
He studies Scott’s back, his untucked T-shirt, the hair hanging across his shoulders. He knows he can’t touch him, though that’s what he wants to do; if he could feel the temperature of Scott again, he could believe the two of them actually did what they just did. Already the noise of the world is intruding: an automobile skids to a stop in the parking lot, grinding loose dirt under the tires. In the distance the sound of end-of-the-day traffic at Five Corners collects into a whoosh.
“Don’t make a big deal of it,” Scott says, then turns and walks past him toward the parking lot, toward the entry road that leads back to town. Robin follows. The dark concrete of the aviary looms at their side.
Two girls wearing feather earrings and tight jeans and high-heeled sandals pass them, heading back toward the building he and Scott just left, gossiping to each other, their conversation peppered with swearing and laughter. Robin lowers his head as he moves by, smelling their sharp perfume, wondering what they might smell on him.
“So I’m gonna go that way,” Scott says when they get to the edge of the park. He nods in the direction opposite town, the other way from Robin’s home.
“I think I’ve got a whole lot of trouble waiting for me,” Robin says, calculating the lost hours, the explanation he’ll have to provide. He pictures his school books in his gym locker, untouched for most of the day.
“A shitload,” Scott says.
“See you tomorrow?” Robin asks.
“Yeah. In fucking gym class.”
“Maybe I’ll try to find you before homeroom.”
“OK,” Scott says. “Later.”
He watches Scott walk away, hoping he’ll turn back and just wave at him. But Scott is walking fast, he doesn’t check for cars when he gets to a curb, enters the intersection without looking. Robin hears a car horn, the screech of brakes—he runs toward the noise in a panic. Scott hops aside and the car slams to a stop, its chrome fender plowing over the crosswalk, the driver yelling a reprimand. Scott flashes his middle finger at the car and breaks into a run, disappearing downhill into the grainy evening. Robin loses sight of him in the twisted oak branches and pale streetlight. “Later,” he says, pushing his hands in his pockets.
He turns and runs the opposite way, darting into the street, into the glow of an approaching car. He stops short on the solid yellow line in the center of the road, waiting for the oncoming traffic to pass, feeling the dangerous growl of speeding vehicles just inches from his body. The vibration of the road grumbles under his feet, up through his legs, into his body like a fever.
He has his story prepared, but it evaporates as he approaches the driveway and sees only his mother’s car. He remembers his father had wanted to take him to the hospital tonight, and his stomach tightens in apprehension. Most of the lights are off. He reaches under the flower pot at the bottom of the stoop for the key but finds the door unlocked. Light spreads across the hall carpet from the living room. His mother is home. The stereo plays an aria, the one from Tosca she adores so much. “I have lived for only art and love” is the English translation. He brushes off his pants—white pants smeared with crud—and swallows and walks forward.
She is on the couch, gripping the edges of a New Yorker. Her hair is clipped up in the back. The floor lamp glows on the back of her neck and casts half her face into shadow. It occurs to him to walk up the stairs and ignore her, but her eyes are upon him immediately, cold and severe. He cannot think of a single thing to say. She shuts the magazine, folding it into one hand. With the other, she lifts her wineglass from the coffee table and drains the last mouthful. She rises and steps toward him, moving into silhouette and then into the glow of the votive candles, burning softly on the table at his side. Her eyes scrutinize him.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
The magazine swings flat against the side of his face. He trips backward, has a moment to register the sting of the first swipe before a second and a third are upon him. The edge of the pages nick the soft skin under his ear. “Your apology means nothing to me,” she says, her voice shrill, trembling. “You were sorry last night.” She raises her arm again and he catches the next blow on his shoulder. He smells the stench from his armpit, which smells to him like Scott, which makes him feel dirty and self-protective all at once.
She lets the magazine drop to the floor and pulls him desperately to her. He lets her hug him, listens as she sniffles and her weight falls upon his shoulders. He holds her waist, steadying them both, sure he cannot support her, that they will collapse to the floor together.
“I am sorry,” he says after a moment.
She pushes him away. “Shut up,” she says, her throat choking on speech. “Don’t lie to me, Robin.” She wipes moisture from her eyes and stumbles to the couch.
Seeing her try to recover, Robin thinks he might cry, too. He rubs his hand along his neck, hot from the swatting she gave him.
Dorothy composes herself, blows her nose into a cocktail napkin, shakes the hair from her eyes. “Let me be clear, Robin. I don’t really want to know where you’ve been because I’m sure it will only disappoint me, but you are going to tell me because I am your mother. I am your mother and you are going to tell me where you’ve been for”—she checks her wristwatch—“the past seven hours.”
“I ditched gym,” he says.
“That much was made known to me by Mr. Cortez. On the telephone.” She stares at him. He has never seen her look at him this way, the way other people’s mothers look at their teenage children, as if they are strangers. “Sit down,” she says.
He sits on the arm of the chair across from her.
“Your pants are filthy,” she says.
He retraces his steps with Scott, back to their locker room conversation. He selects the parts of the day that matter least, the things he can tell her. “I went into town,” he says. “I got pizza and looked at magazines at Woolworth’s and went to that antique store where you can watch old flip movies in the viewer. You know, the five cent ones.”
“Nickelodeons.”
“Yeah. We saw a funny one with Keester Cops.”
“Keystone.”
“And then we went to the park.”
“We?”
He slides down to the seat cushion. He looks at his fingers, rubs one hand with the other, wishing he could have washed before he got home.
“Me and Scott,” he says. He is unsure how much to say, does not want to be trapped into saying everything.
“Were you drinking? I can tell you were smoking cigarettes. I can smell that on you.” Her posture remains rigid, her eyes unblinking now that the tears have stopped.
“We had one,” Robin says. “Scott found it.”
“Who is Scott?”
“Scott Schatz. A kid from school.”
“What kind of kid?”
“Just a kid, some kid in my gym class.”
“One with enough luck to find a cigarette in the park.”
“Exactly,” Robin says, matching her sarcastic tone. “And nice enough to share it.”
“Hooray for you, pumpkin. You’ve made a friend.”
He slams his fist into the seat.
“Don’t you have a temper tantrum, Robin,” she hisses. “You have not earned a temper tantrum. So what else?”
“There’s nothing else,” He watches her refill her wineglass, hating the gurgling sound, the sound of his mother drinking more. He crosses his arms. “Where’s Dad and the rest of them?” he asks.
“At the hospital. Where do you think?” He hangs his head guiltily. “When your father found out you left school unexcused, he hit the roof. He was ready to hit you.”
“You did a pretty good job for him,” he says, rubbing the side of his face for emphasis.
She bangs her wineglass on the table and raises her voice. “You’re acting like a juvenile delinquent—what do you expect from me?”
“I left school ’cause I couldn’t take it!” he blurts out. “It was worse than ever and nothing made sense and these guys in the locker room were calling me names. What was I supposed to do? Stick around and take it?”
“You should have come home. That’s where you belong—not in the park like a common New Jersey greaseball. You should have come home.”
“I made a friend, you should be happy I have a friend. A guy friend.” His voice trembles. He hears the truth and the lies in his words battering against each other and cannot contain the explosion of it. “Isn’t that what everyone expects, for me to be more like a guy? Have guy friends? So you know what guys do? They ditch school and hitchhike and smoke and they don’t run home to their mothers like a big crybaby.”
Without expecting it, he has shattered a silence so ever-present, so old, he’d forgotten it was there. Up until third grade, he hadn’t felt so separate. He’d played with guys and girls, moving between different circles during recess. And then, after some arrangement between the school and his parents, he’d been put up to fourth, and it wasn’t ever the same. He was suddenly an interloper, a brain, spurned by new classmates whose social hierarchies were already cemented. He’d already dropped out of Cub Scouts, stopped going to Little League—moving up a grade severed the last link. There were still guys he could call friends if he wanted to—George Lincoln, his lab partner, Ricky Feeney from down the street, a shy kid who sits next to him in social studies, Gerald the Trekkie from the cafeteria—all of them contained by school hours, familiarity that starts at nine A.M. and ends at three. Only Victoria has been constant, someone to gab with for hours on the phone, to accompany him on bike rides to Dairy Queen, to watch Grease with a half dozen times, she singing Sandy’s songs, he singing Rizzo’s. A girl for a best friend.
“I’m taking Jackson fishing on Saturday,” his father might say. “Why don’t you come along? Bring a friend?”
“Victoria wouldn’t like that,” he’d reply, squashing the conversation. His father turning away, frustrated, baffled. The rest of it unspoken, rippling in waves.
Dorothy leaps up and walks to the mirror, addressing her image as she speaks. “This is an absurd discussion. Your brother is in the hospital, for God’s sake, and I have to sit here and psychoanalyze you.”
“Then don’t psychoanalyze me!” he shouts. “Just leave me alone.”
“This entire conversation has been at fever pitch, and I won’t have it. My mother and I used to scream at each other all the time, I won’t have it with my own children.”
Robin sees the effect of the wine in her bleary eyes. He wants to turn the spotlight off himself, so he says, “I never heard Nana scream at you.”
She returns to the table for her glass and paces across the floor. He hears her words slurring together as she picks up speed. “Because she doesn’t anymore! When I was younger she was always drawing me into screaming matches. She’s an incredibly aggressive woman. You wouldn’t know that because she’s mellowed with age. But she has spent her whole godforsaken life waiting on Smith girls, and when she came home, she had nothing but examples to give me. Emulate this one, avoid that one. This one’s showing poor character, that one’s going to be a lady. I never had a choice but to attend Smith; it was free and it was where my mother was going to have her day, with me as Exhibit A.”
The speakers buzz with static; the aria has ended, and the needle is hissing against the center label, stuck in place. Robin gets up and flips it over, letting the music build again into a crescendo. He falls back on the couch, exhausted. He isn’t sure why his mother is saying all this; is she still trying to get information from him about what he did today? What would she do if he told her what really happened? Would she tell his father? Would he be punished? He can’t even guess what they’d do to him if he told the truth.
He wonders where Scott is right now, if he’s being yelled at by his father and mother. Not his mother—he remembers Scott saying his mother was in a mental hospital.
Dorothy drops into a chair in the dining room, her back to Robin. She speaks with her face raised to the ceiling; she doesn’t seem to notice him at all. “Even in New York, she demanded that I call her every Sunday morning. I was twenty-two years old and working at Scribner’s, I was an executive secretary to the vice president of public affairs, I was dating men and going to parties. I was doing everything I wanted to do and my mother was still nagging me about doing it better.”
He gets up and sits across from her at the table. In the dim light he can see only a hint of her faraway expression. She laughs—the sound is almost cruel. “The only thing she ever approved of was my marrying your father. She had no choice, of course.” She catches her breath and lowers her head. She reaches out and clutches one of Robin’s hands. He is surprised by the strength of her grasp. “Robin, I’m upset. I shouldn’t have struck you. Jackson’s situation is driving me crazy. Do you understand that? I know you understand that, Robin—you know me.”
He nods in agreement, though right now he doesn’t think he knows her at all.
“Don’t make it any worse for me. Don’t disappear on your bike. Don’t cut school. Don’t pick fights with your sister.” She is shaking his hand; their knuckles rap against the tabletop.
He wriggles free of her grip. “Don’t drink so much wine,” he says coolly. He takes her glass with him as he leaves the table. He rinses it out in the sink, dries it, places it in the cupboard methodically. He walks past her without a word and climbs the stairs, letting the music continue its dramatic rise and fall.
Later, tossing atop the flannel sheets on Ruby’s bed, the blanket and bedspread crumpled at his feet, he wonders if he is ill. His eyelids are heavy and dry, each blink an irritant. He is exhausted but can’t sleep. His father yelled and yelled when he got home, grabbed him by the shoulders and shook until Robin thought his neck might snap. Called him a jerk. Said he was an embarrassment. Told him he would be confined to the house except for school for the foreseeable future. His father is back at the hospital now but Uncle Stan is here. Robin can hear the distorted rumblings of the television in the living room, and the more urgent whisperings between his mother and Nana Rena from his parents’ bedroom. He is sure they are all talking about him. He leans over the edge of the bed and spits a salty, gluey gob into the white garbage pail. His throat stings as if rubbed by sandpaper. He leans his head into the pillow and his ear throbs with the memory of his mother’s slaps.
He is remembering Scott’s face as a series of snapshots, frozen portraits: Scott in the locker room mirror; Scott in the backseat of the car, wind on his face; Scott’s hair falling forward as he pushed his body into Robin. They were kissing—he has to remind himself of this simple fact: it seems now as if it didn’t happen, couldn’t have happened. His face is hot to the touch. He runs the back of his hand along his mouth, pressing the delicate bones into the flesh of his lips, embarrassed for wanting Scott’s mouth against him again, wondering if Scott will even speak to him again. Was he a bad kisser? Scott definitely knew how to kiss, he knew how to make it feel good. He wanted to do it with me. He got me stoned and then he made me do sex. He asks himself, How do I know that was sex?
His hand is in his pajama pants, and the images are taking over: not Scott, but Todd, Todd’s eyes in the car that morning, Todd’s hair falling into his face, Todd’s body, bigger than Scott’s, the arms stronger against his arms, the stiffness stronger against his legs. He sees Todd smiling, a smile that scares him; he feels his skin, his neck, his spine coil together into a tightening knot. Todd is shaking a fistful of his crotch like Danniman. Danniman is saying, “This girlie wants a meal,” Robin is pinned against a locker room wall, and Long Dong Danniman is pushing him pushing him pushing him.
He buries his face in Ruby’s pillow and lets the rush of wetness fill his cupped hands.
The clock says 11:15. He takes a chance, tiptoes downstairs. On TV, Johnny Carson is interviewing an actress in a tight dress. Johnny is raising his eyebrows, having just told an off-color joke, and the actress is laughing along uncomfortably. Uncle Stan looks up from the TV set and breaks off his own snickering to ask Robin where he thinks he’s going.
“I have to call my friend Victoria,” Robin says, not stopping.
“I think the phone’s pretty much off limits to you right now, buster.”
“I’m supposed to get a ride from her in the morning,” Robin says, still moving toward the kitchen, but slowing his steps.
“Oh, yeah?” Stan responds in a challenging tone. Robin recognizes the start of an unbearable lecture. Here we go, he thinks, stopping, resting his hands on his hips. “Weren’t you listening to your father? You’re not getting rides from any of your hotshot friends anymore. A little taste of house arrest is the idea. Your mother’s gonna take you to school.” Stan folds his arms smugly across his belly.
“Well, then I have to tell Victoria before she goes to bed.”
“She’ll figure it out.” Stan jerks his thumb toward the staircase. “Good night.”
Robin rolls his eyes. “How long are you planning on hanging around here anyway, Uncle Stan? Don’t you have to go to work?”
Stan glares at him. “If it’s any-a your business, wiseguy, I’m taking a couple of days off. A guy’s gotta stick by his family in times of trouble.”
“What about Larry? He’s your family.”
“He’s with his mother.” Stan uncrosses his arms and throws them over his head, speaking while he stretches. “Anyway, I got some ideas about physical therapy for Jackson. Your father and I are gonna check out this new system a buddy-a mine’s selling.”
Robin frowns. “Yeah, right.”
Stan picks at a fingernail while he continues. “It’s very state-a the art stuff. I kid you not. When Jackson gets outta the hospital, it’s gonna take the newest technology to get him back up to speed.” He looks up, catching sight of Robin’s dubious expression. “Between you and me, Robin, I’d-a bought you a beer for acting a little bit out of line today. ’Cept of course you made everyone worry, and that never works. But I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: you’re already too tied to Mama’s apron strings. When all this stuff with your brother wears off, you oughtta get out there a little. I let Larry hang out, never hurt anyone. Never hurt me. In fact, I’d go so far to say that if you get some-a that stuff out of your system now, you’ll be more prepared. You know, the real world don’t have a lotta tolerance for smarty-pants types like you.”
“Can I just make my phone call before she goes to bed?”
A big laugh on the TV captures Stan’s attention. “Make it fast,” he says.
Robin dials Victoria’s number from memory and stretches the phone cord to the basement stairs.
On the second ring, he gets Mrs. Spicer’s surprised voice.
“It’s Robin MacKenzie. Is Victoria up still?” he says quickly.
“I usually don’t let her take calls this late, Robin. Is everything all right?”
“Oh, you know. Could be better.” He taps his bare toes on the stairs.
“Is there some news on your brother?”
“Maybe he’s getting better. They’re thinking about physical therapy.” He cringes as he hears himself making Uncle Stan’s plan sound like a solution.
“Tell your family our prayers are with him. We’re all very concern—”
“Mrs. Spicer, would you mind getting Victoria? I really need to talk to her.”
“Oh, all right. But don’t keep her on long.”
Nana Rena steps into the kitchen doorway. Her footfalls are slow and heavy. She isn’t wearing a wig, and her scalp shines pink under the few wiry tendrils that shoot off in every direction. Her nightdress is an enormous swatch of plaid—something Robin vaguely remembers Dorothy giving her for Christmas.
“I thought we put you to bed hours ago,” she says.
“I forgot I had to call Victoria.”
“But it’s past eleven!”
“Did you come down for a cup of tea?” he asks.
“Why should I be able to sleep any better than the rest of this clan?” she asks, balancing herself against a chair and studying him. “I can hardly believe the state of the lot of you. You off like a hooligan two days running. Your sister scared witless. Your father”—she shakes her head as if confronting the greatest tragedy of all—“well, he was fit to be tied. And isn’t Dottie just worked into a tizzy, keeping me up for hours, telling me this is all my fault.”
“Robin?” Victoria’s breathy voice.
“Yeah, hold on,” he says. “Don’t hang up.” He puts his hand over the receiver. “Nana, this is private.” He closes himself in behind the basement door before she can register a protest.
“Hi, Victoria. Sorry. My Nana’s talking my ear off,” he whispers.
“I’m really glad you called,” she says.
“You are?”
“I’ve just been bumming out all night. I was even crying, I swear. After school I was thinking about your brother and how this morning I was such a jerk in the car.”
“That’s OK,” he says. He had nearly forgotten about the ride to school. It already seems days old.
Victoria keeps on. “It’s just that Todd makes me crazy. I can’t help it. He’s so weird—”
“Look, Victoria,” he interrupts. “I had a really big day. I have to talk to you about it. I just got in a big fight with my mother. I think she has a drinking problem.”
“At first I just thought I shouldn’t even talk to you. You walked away from me this morning without even saying good-bye. I mean, that’s just rude. But then I thought it over, you know? I thought about it all day, and you and I have been friends for so long and you’re really special and I don’t ever want you to change.”
He sighs, frustrated that she’s doing all the talking. “I know,” he says, trying to be patient. “We have been friends for so long.” But he wants to ask why it feels so strained lately. High school has stolen the ease from their friendship. When the Spicers moved to the neighborhood seven years ago, he took Victoria in. He introduced her to other kids in their neighborhood and at Crossroads, made it easy for her to be the new girl; she rewarded him with her free time, her enthusiasm for his stories of the city, her willingness to participate, along with Ruby, in his after-school basement dramas.
It wasn’t only shared interests, like Grease and gossip, that kept them glued together over the years. Sometimes they just hung out, doing homework, watching TV, listening to 45s in her bedroom. Before she went to her cousins’ this summer, Victoria would join him on his lawn mowing jobs, sitting on a stoop as he crisscrossed the grass or, if he needed the help, trimming the edges with clippers. They’d spend the money on pizza and video games at Jerry’s in town. The neighborhood ladies sometimes referred to them as going steady, but they’d just roll their eyes, understanding, without needing to say it, how stupid adults could be.
“I think we should stay friends,” she says in a rush, “even if we make other friends.”
He pictures the pout on her face as she twists the phone cord around her wrist like a bracelet. He knows the best way to reassure her is to launch into his story, to bring her back into his confidence. “OK,” he says. “Listen—today was major. I cut school from fourth period on.”
“You ditched?”
“Yeah, me and this kid Scott Schatz.”
“Scott Schatz?” she gasps.
“You know him?”
“Yes,” she snaps as if this should be obvious. Now he sees her hopping up on the counter next to the draining board, where she sits for hours on the phone every night. “Robin,” she says with a dramatic pause, “he’s such a scum.”
“I know he’s a burnout,” he says defensively. “But he’s really nice. He really listened to me.”
“No, I mean he’s a major scum. He used to be friends with Todd.”
“He used to be friends with Todd?” he repeats, his voice cracking in shock.
“Like, like two years ago, when Todd was a sophomore and Scott was in eighth grade. They were hanging out together all the time.”
“How come I never saw him?”
“I don’t know. He was at our house a lot.”
“He didn’t tell me he knew Todd,” Robin says, more to himself than to her. He thinks of what Scott said: how he’d hung out in his neighborhood, how he knew about the two cars in his driveway.
“Well, they stopped being friends. I mean, Todd was older and going to high school and Scott was bugging him. He used to call up all the time and want to talk to Todd, and then he wouldn’t say anything when Todd got on the phone.”
“He doesn’t talk much,” Robin says. He can’t quite absorb this, feels himself sinking under the notion that he is somehow the target of a conspiracy. “I can’t believe he knows Todd.”
“I can’t believe you ditched school with him.”
“That was only the beginning. We hitched a ride with this crazy girl who works at New Sounds. Then we hung out at The Bird and we smoked cigarettes and smoked pot.”
“Robin, he’ll turn you into a scum, too,” Victoria says very seriously. He hears a sudden mechanical buzz from her end of the phone. “Sorry,” she says. “I’m making a yogurt shake. Diane showed me how. Diane Jernigan? It’s with this new frozen yogurt.”
He’s suddenly feeling like this call was a terrible idea. “I gotta go.”
“Wait! You can’t just start something—”
He sighs heavily. “We just got pizza and stuff and then when I got home my mother freaked out.” He realizes he has been holding his breath, as if in suspense of what he might allow himself to say. It’s a relief now not to tell her everything. “I might get detention. Maybe Scott will get it, too.”
“Scums never get detention.” She punctuates this pronouncement with a slurpy suck on her straw. “They always figure out how to talk their way out of it. Or they sign in and then don’t stay, and the teachers never tell, or even if they tell the principal, what else can he do? Give you more detention?”
“They could suspend you.”
“They tried that with Todd, but my father just went in there and said”—she deepens her voice—“‘If you keep this boy out of school he’ll be on the streets even more. We can’t keep him at home.’ And the principal was like”—she changes to another adult male voice—“OK, but then it will be your responsibility to make him stop ditching.’ ” She takes another slurp and resumes with her own perfectly satisfied voice. “And then my father just beat the shit out of Todd and he stopped cutting for a while and went to detention like he was supposed to.”
“I remember that, when he was in detention for a month.” A memory forms of those months: Todd’s increasing presence in the yard, smoking cigarettes, fixing up motors. Robin peeks his head out the door to see if Nana is still there. Seeing no sign of her, he walks to the window. The light is on in Todd’s room. Todd is probably sitting on his bed listening to rock music with no idea that Victoria is downstairs telling Robin things about him. I am a spy, he tells himself, figuring out secrets. “I can’t believe Scott didn’t mention Todd.”
Victoria bangs something down on the counter—the sound might be her spoon or glass or maybe the blender itself. “Todd, Scott. Are you trying to turn into a scum, too?”
“I’m just having fun, Victoria. I’m taking risks.”
“Hey!”
Robin jumps and spins around. Uncle Stan gives him a long, authoritative gaze, nodding his head as if computing information. “What are you still doing on the phone?”
“Nothing.”
“You got sixty seconds before I hang up for you,” Stan says before strutting back to the TV.
Robin squeezes his fingers around the receiver. “Shit, I have to go,” he says. “I’ll see you in school.”
“Wait,” Victoria says, almost desperately. “I mean it, Robin. You’re really special. Don’t hang around Scott Schatz.”
“God, Victoria, don’t make a big deal of it. Good-bye.” He hangs up before she can respond.
In the living room Robin kisses his grandmother good night and does his best to ignore Stan. He is halfway up the stairs when Stan calls out, “Anything you want to tell me, Robin?”
Robin spins around. It’s almost surreal—Stan has spent so much time here that now he’s trying to keep Robin in line. It’s like having a third parent who is far worse than the first two. He answers sarcastically, “I was just telling Victoria how lucky I am to have an uncle who is so concerned about me.”
“You better watch your mouth, kid,” Stan growls, but a moment later he’s fixating on the TV set, guffawing along with the studio audience. As he carries himself up the stairs, Robin is almost glad Stan is here. Stan is the one person in this house he can hate without feeling any guilt.