6
“I thought about asking Tony DiAvalo to draw something on my cast.”
It’s a little dramatic to call it a cast. It’s more like, I don’t know, an arm brace. I’ve seen girls on the soccer team wear them. Eric’s arm is just sprained. Some joints are sort of messed up but nothing’s broken. He has some minor cuts and abrasions on his face where he hit the street. It actually looks like he gave a pretty good account of himself in a really cool fight.
“I know I said it already, but I am really sorry.”
“I thought I could walk,” Eric says. “It really felt like I could.”
“You were pretty insistent.”
“My mom hates you. I’ve been over at your house a ton and she gets called to the emergency room. So that’s the great loss here, all the esteem my mom had for you previously.”
“Did she?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Anyway. Sorry.”
“It’s okay. But can we put a moratorium on testing my limits?”
I say I guess we probably should.
This electric hum starts. Then the sound of a chain grinding against something. For the first time since Eric and I started sitting here at lunch, the loading dock door is sliding open. The light that’s bright as hell out here at lunchtime even in late November spills into what’s behind the door, which I guess is whatever’s behind the auditorium.
The door finishes opening and the hum stops. Then this other sound starts, wheels on concrete and rumbling. All these big wooden slabs start rolling out on wheels, a bunch of girls pushing them. Some of the girls look like Cecelia and her friends, bigger girls with spiked belts and black T-shirts and hair they might’ve colored with highlighters. A girl who doesn’t look like Cecelia and her friends, with black hair up in those kind of braids you might see at the Renaissance Fair, a girl who I’m 95 percent sure is the girl from IHOP, catches me looking at her chest. But mostly the girls look straight ahead, navigating these huge rolling pieces of wood that remind me of sailboats for some reason except instead of sails they have plywood sticking straight up, painted all over with a big-city skyline, some parts of which are more accurate, perspective-wise, than others.
“Goodbye, Guys and Dolls!” says a fat kid standing in the open loading dock door. He waves at the big wheeled cityscapes.
“Hey, Gary,” says one of the girls, “why don’t you, like, help, instead of like standing there?”
“Uhm, I DID help!” the kid, Gary I guess, says. “I’m just a little emotional right now, ’kay?” He has a high voice and a little bit of a Southern accent and a T-shirt that says IF YOU CAN’T RUN WITH THE BIG DOGS, GET OFF THE PORCH.
Drama kids. There are band kids and drama kids and the amorphous weird kids, free-floating nerds like Eric and me. There are other camps that could be called nerds but they’re, like, the Anime Club and the Chess Club and they experience a lot of crossover with the drama kids and the band kids. You see the band kids practicing in the morning on the field where Eric and I staged our imaginary biologically modified troop invasion and I guess if you went to football games you would see them performing at half-time. But the drama kids you never see. You might have one or two in some of your classes and never know it until they stand up at the end of class and remind everybody that they have one of their plays this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night. And they only have like two a year so you rarely get that reminder. The auditorium and adjoining classroom and whatever else is in that wing of the school is pretty much all theirs, their own little enclave where they could be doing any number of things, like sacrificing goats, but probably they just sing loudly to each other.
The big wheeled cityscapes pause right in front of Eric and me. The one girl and Gary keep bitching at each other. The girl whose chest I got caught looking at who I’m approaching 97 percent sure is the girl from IHOP comes over to us.
“Hey guys,” she says, “we’re gonna be painting out here for a while. It’s spray paint so it could get kind of messy. Just, like, fair warning.”
“Lunch is over in a minute,” Eric says. Aren’t you guys going to have to paint kind of fast?”
“We get to skip sixth period,” she says, “once every couple of weeks to help out with set-painting stuff. Our drama director made it so we can write it up as, like, volunteering.”
Sixth period I have advanced chemistry, which is an exercise in torture because despite how much of Eric’s and my stuff centers around biological modification and rips in time and the human genome perverted by radioactive ghosts, I’m terrible at actual nuts-and-bolts science. It’s the only class I have that is neither easy nor something I’m good at. Eric has health, which he hates because it’s easy. We’re different people but we both have sixth periods that suck.
“Can we help?” Eric asks.
“Uhm … sure!” the girl says, looking pretty skeptically at Eric’s arm brace, maybe wondering how much help he’ll actually be.
“I’m Eric,” Eric says, “and this is Darren.”
“Hi, Eric. Hi, Darren. I’m Christine.”
“Hi, Christine,” Eric says. I’m not sure I want to be around these people or help paint and this is my only clean pair of jeans and if I get paint on them I’ll have paint on my jeans for the rest of the week and it’ll be a tell-tale sign that I wear the same jeans every day.
Christine looks at me. I don’t know who I think I’m impressing and no one looks at my jeans anyway and fuck if I want to sit across from my lab partner today and have him look at me like I’m an idiot because I just don’t understand valence electrons. I get up off the ground.
“Hi, Christine,” I say.
“Guys, this is Eric and Darren,” Christine says to her crew of girls in black hoodies and studded belts. We meet Marisa, Ashley, Claire, and another Ashley. They are nice and it doesn’t seem fake. We meet Gary, who rolls his eyes at us.
Another guy, Ryan, comes out of the loading dock with some spray cans and some newspapers. He has big fuck-off boots and a newsboy cap and a white wifebeater. We spread the newspaper all around the rolling platforms. Pretty soon Ryan is placing his boots on the faces of bad local columnists in the pictures next to their bylines as we shake up the spray cans and cover the cityscapes in gray. The girls throw around gossip featuring the names of people we don’t know.
“It’s the cast party,” one Ashley says, “it’s for the CAST. What did she expect?”
“Kyle was being, like, the anti-Kyle on Saturday night,” another Ashley says.
“Alisha has a lesbian switch she can like turn on and off,” Marisa says.
“What is this for?” Eric asks about the platforms.
“A play,” Gary says, like we’re idiots for asking, like every tenth-grader knows that the first step in the process of making a play is to spray-paint some wood with wheels on it.
“Didn’t you guys just do a play?” Eric asks. Some of the Day-Glo-orange flyers are still blowing around in the parking lot.
“Yes,” says Marisa, and sighs so you can hear it.
All the girls get really quiet. The wind that’s blowing the flyers around kicks up even more and with their hair blowing around they seem like war widows or something because they all start sighing.
“Guys and Dolls,” one Ashley says. “The first ever fall musical in the school’s history.”
“There will never be another show that good. I guarantee it,” Marisa says.
“Never,” agrees another Ashley.
“It was miraculous,” Claire says. “Everything came together.”
Eric and I look at Ryan for some sort of masculine confirmation or denial.
Ryan shrugs. “It was pretty fuckin’ good.”
“I don’t know how we’re going to top it,” Gary says, “especially with some … experiment.”
“It’s not an experiment,” Christine says, “it’s an experimental theater piece.”
“Oh, right, THAT,” Gary says.
Christine explains: “We do two shows every year. A play and a musical. Usually the musical’s in spring and we spend the rest of our budget on it. This year our theater director Mr. Hendershaw did the musical in the fall so that way we’d have money left over and we could do a third play, after Christmas break. It’s something he wrote himself. It’s going to be amazing. He’s a genius.”
The other girls and Gary look away and keep painting. Ryan has gone to get his iPod out of his truck.
“It doesn’t seem like anybody else agrees with you, necessarily,” Eric says. I kind of want to hit him. I only ever deal with him when it’s just us, for the most part, so I forget what an awkward dude he is around people.
“I don’t know,” Christine says.
“It’s just…” Marisa says, “three PLAYS? I mean, it’s never been done before, much less, like, something that’s never been seen before. I dunno, it seems … controversial.”
“EXACTLY, controversial, exactly,” Christine says. “I’m not saying Guys and Dolls wasn’t great, it’s just, you know, nobody walked out of there going ‘Wow, that changed the way I view the world,’ you know?”
“It was supposed to do that?” one of the Ashleys says.
“No. I don’t know. But we’re artists, right? Shouldn’t we ALWAYS want to do that?”
“I just like dancing,” the other Ashley says.
“Mr. Hendershaw’s piece has dance aspects,” Christine says.
“Christine has suck-up aspects,” Gary says.
Christine glares at Gary. What Christine has told us are called “flats” are now drying, completely gray, and the lunch bell hasn’t even rung yet. Ryan pulls his truck up to the loading dock, leaves the driver’s side door open, and blasts us all with ska music, the kind that, because of how bouncy it is, I can’t imagine anyone but Muppets listening to.
“Ugh,” Christine says to me. “I hate this.”
“Yeah, right?” I say. We are standing in the gravel watching paint dry.
“What kind of music do you like?” Christine says.
“I dunno. A lot of stuff. You probably haven’t heard a lot of it.”
“Try me,” Christine says.
“Uhm … okay … Styles Replay, Overlee, Manboy, Church Cancels Cow …”
“I LOVE Church Cancels Cow. Aren’t they amazing?”
“They are,” I say. “They are amazing.” This isn’t even the shit that my brother likes that I’ve picked up on, or the music Eric and I have decided would be good for the movies. This is the stuff I really actually like, not the things I like publicly.
“And Manboy … Oh my God. I haven’t heard … what was it?”
“Styles Replay? Overlee?”
“Overlee.”
“They’re great,” I say. “I’ll burn you their albums,” I say before I know I’m saying it.
“That would be great. Some of the people who were seniors when I was a freshman in Theater Division that are in college now, we still keep in touch. And they’ve got pretty good taste, but it’s not enough,” Christine says. “I’m so tired of ska and pop-punk and musicals, musicals, musicals.”
“Me too,” I say, even though I couldn’t name four musicals if you paid me. My dad listens to jazz and classic rock and my brother listens to Christian scream-o and crack rap and country to be ironic and Eric listens to everything, one thing at a time, and I don’t think he’s anywhere near the genre of musicals yet.
“This is a weird question,” Christine says. “Were you at IHOP really late on Friday night?”
“Yeah,” I say, “that was us.”
“I thought so!” Christine said. “We went there Friday after the show. Well, some of us. The musical has tons of people in it so we didn’t want to—that was a whole other dramatic situation. Just once I want to go for French toast without being accused of elitism, you know?”
“Sure. When we were there Eric accused me of elitism like four different times.”
Christine laughs and the wind blows hard in our direction.
“Well, there are lots of really fascinating sides to the abortion issue,” Eric is saying to Claire and an Ashley.
“No. No. I’m sorry. No, we can’t even discuss this,” Claire says. I have no idea how they got on the subject of abortion.
The lunch bell rings.
“Looks like we’re done. With this part anyway. Thanks for the help,” Christine says.
“Oh, uhm, you’re welcome. Should we still stay for sixth period, or…”
“Okay, well, let’s think of this from God’s point of view,” Eric says. “Just theoretically.”
“NO. NO. NO,” Claire says.
“That’s not very rational, and that’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Eric says.
“Maybe you shouldn’t,” Christine says. “You guys, I mean. I mean … I don’t know if our director would be able to get you approved, and …”
“Right,” I say. “Eric, we should go.”
“But we get to stay through sixth period!” Eric says. “Legally! Right?”
I shake my head.
“Oh.”
Eric goes to start packing up his lunch, now hyperconscious of maybe being late to sixth period, even if it is just health. I go to grab my backpack.
“I’ll see you around, I guess. For that CD and whatever.”
“Hey!” Christine says. “We’re having this party this weekend. If you want to give it to me there.”
“Uhm. Okay.” Are you inviting me to a party, I want to say. But I realize that would be a stupid thing to say to someone who was actually inviting you to a party.
“Are you on Namespot? I can just message you the details.”
“Uhm. Yeah. Yeah, I’m on Namespot.”
“Awesome! I’ll do it as soon as I get home.”
“Okay,” I say, knowing I should walk away, heading for my backpack as quickly as I can because if I don’t I might screw it up somehow.
“Bye!” Christine says.
“Bye,” I say, and look back so I don’t seem completely subnormal, and to make sure the thing that I think just invited me to a party is a girl and not a trick of the light or swamp gas or a bunch of Drama Club flyers whipped around by the wind into a girl-shaped cyclone. It is, in fact, a girl, and she’s waving and cute.
Eric is waiting around the corner, I think because he got the hint that if he stayed any longer one of our new drama friends was going to slap him.
“What did that girl say to you?” Eric says.
Most of the gossip you hear in school anymore is not about things that happened at school or even in people’s bedrooms but things that happened on Namespot where it’s impossible to detect sarcasm and girls nearly rip each others’ eyes out over being bumped out of their friends’ “Top Tags,” and Eric and I have sworn never to join the cult, we would honestly rather have our brains eaten by spiders, as per Eric’s worst-way-to-die.
“Nothing,” I say.
I need to get to a computer.
I duck into the library. My sixth-period lab partner is just going to have to wait five or ten minutes to look at me like I’m stupid.
I grab a computer in a study carrel over by the dusty “Young Adult Fiction” section. I type “namespot.com” into the browser: It loads, thank God. Sometimes sites that are for purposes of entertainment are blocked by the school’s firewall, but the librarians probably aren’t the quickest trend-seekers and Namespot is something like the eighth social-networking site kids our age have adopted and then abandoned in the time I’ve been in high school.
As soon as the page loads I feel like a complete sellout: The front page is covered in banner ads for truly awful skate-punk bands and, look, I can enter a contest to be an extra in a sequel to a movie about a hard-luck inner-city dance gang. I hit JOIN.
I enter my real name. One of the million things that make Namespot obnoxious is the tendency people have to make their profile names cute or weird or off, like instead of Deandra, a girl might be DEANDRACAN’TWAIT4THAWEEKEND! Or a dude, instead of Chris, might be BMX_IZ_4_FAGS. I won’t do that and plus how is Christine supposed to find me if I do? I guess people do it to prevent “stalking,” which is a big preoccupation everybody seems to have, but nobody’s going to stalk me. People just wish they were stalked. Given the option, they’d stalk themselves.
At first I start coasting through profile blanks, entering not much if anything at all for likes, dislikes, influences. (Influences on what? My Namespot profile?) But then I realize I want her to think I didn’t just whip this profile up so she could invite me to a drama party, it has to look lived in, used. But what the fuck do you say?
For bands, I put the three bands I talked to her about, but then I think, no, that looks odd. I only like three bands? So I intersperse them with some other things, a band or two I’ve heard my brother mention, and some things my dad likes, like The Band, and some things I remember Eric rattling off when he was talking about his industrial phase. Then I look back at what I have and I think, This is weird, does this look like I’m too eclectic? Does this look like I’m joking? Then I think maybe Christine’s got Namespot on her phone, maybe she’s in class looking for me right now, and the thought simultaneously excites me and freaks me the fuck out: I have to finish this. For books I put a couple sci-fi authors, old ones, old enough to sound either cool or obscure, and throw Salinger in there for good measure. Movies: Fight Club, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Sin City. Not my favorite movies, my brothers’, but mine sound too nerdy (the sacred texts like Star Wars, the original trilogy, and Lord of the Rings, and beyond that to be honest with you my favorite movies are theoretical ones that haven’t been made yet and I think only people like me and Eric would make. You see how I can’t write that). I leave relationship status blank: not desperate, not anything, an enigma. Yeah.
One thing it’s missing, I realize, is an in-joke. A private thing between me and all the friends I have who spend all evening checking each other’s profiles when we really ought to be doing homework. So under “Least Favorite Things,” I write “Richard’s dog.” Who’s Richard? What has his dog ever done to me? I have no fucking clue. But it seems like some dumb thing somebody would write. All the blanks filled in and tolerably smart and believable, I hit SEND.
The ancient school computer creaks and groans and the little world in the browser bar spins and finally the next page loads. “Add a picture.” Fuck shit balls.
If I don’t put one up, then my whole effort to make this thing look lived-in will be for nothing. Everybody has a picture on their profile. Narcissism is what this whole game is about. But there aren’t any pictures of me, really, besides yearbook photos, and won’t that look strange, unless it’s my first-grade yearbook photo, in which case it’ll be ironic, and I’m not about to be that asshole. I could put a picture that isn’t me, that’s Chuck Norris or George Washington arm-wrestling a tiger or some idiotic thing, but that’s another kind of asshole I’m not chomping at the bit to be.
Then I remember: tucked in the bottom of my bag, waiting for me to remember to take it out and leave it at home, really, is this sketchbook, not my TimeBlaze sketchbook, but a nicer one I’ve used for what I guess I would call “real drawing.” For like landscapes and people and sketches of hands and things like that. Things I do occasionally to try to prove to myself I’m not just doodling, but things that at the end of the day I’m just not good enough at or which don’t feature enough head wounds to hold my interest. Inside that notebook is I guess what you’d call a self-portrait. I dig the notebook out, flip through, and it’s there, between an aborted attempt to draw the mountains behind my house and a female statue’s right boob. It’s not bad. It’s not good, either. I guess it just looks like I didn’t really try, which is kind of what I want, I mean, if I’m going to be an asshole with his Namespot profile picture a line drawing of him done by him, it better be one where it looks like I went “meh” and scratched it on a napkin while I was watching TV. And it looks enough like me, I guess. Anyway, time is ticking, I’ve spent maybe ten minutes on this as it is. So without thinking about it a whole lot more I put the notebook page in the flatbed scanner next to the computer. I crop me, half-trying, half-finished me, out from between the shitty mountains and the floating stone boob, save me as a JPEG, and post me in my profile. I hit FINISH. The computer creaks, the little world spins, my profile loads. I am now part of the problem.
I expect that the nightmare is pretty much over and I am now findable by any cute drama girl who might want to invite me to a party for some reason, and I don’t want to look at my new profile the way you don’t want to look at anything horrible you’ve done, but I accidentally do anyway as I’m going to log off and I see, stamped across the top of this fucking monster, “MEMBER SINCE TODAY.” The game is up. I could make ten thousand friend requests to make it look like I’ve been a Namespot jockey since way back, but it wouldn’t matter. Member since TODAY.
I go back to class feeling retarded for doing so much work. But then I think, that’s probably the same amount of work, the same amount of worrying about what nonexistent people and imaginary girls are going to think about what three movies in your “Favorite Movies” section say about you when put next to one another, and every other thing, I just did it compressed into ten minutes between lunch and sixth period.
The reason I know so much about Namespot even though I think it’s repulsive is, Eric and I can’t get enough of it. Nights at his place when I’ve forgotten to bring my Xbox and we’re bored of populating the zombie senate of the postsingularity necroplanet, we go online and scoff at people’s Namespot profiles and how unique everybody thinks they are. Sometimes we look at pictures of parties we didn’t get to go to. It would be pathetic if we actually wanted to go to those parties, but we don’t, so it isn’t. It’s sort of a making-fun-of-people buffet. It’s almost too easy. People putting themselves out there convinced we’ll be charmed by their overwhelming uniqueness. Well, we aren’t charmed, Eric and I.
I get to sixth period all sweaty from rushing. I apologize for being late. The teacher tells me it may count as an absence.
My lab partner Ramesh gapes at me. I wonder what his three favorite movies are.
At my house after school I’m drawing the undercarriage of a mechanized bodysuit Eric and I are convinced is going to revolutionize the way people think about mechs in sci-fi but I’m distracted and I keep telling Eric I have to go to the bathroom. It’s a little like when I was in third grade but I got skipped ahead to fourth-grade math and I got so freaked out being around older kids I’d go to the bathroom like four times a class. Nobody ever called me out on it to my face except one time a kid who sat in front of me said to the kid sitting next to him, “That kid sure goes to the bathroom a lot.” The fact that my existence had even been acknowledged one way or the other was as good as being beaten down by the entire fourth grade math class, which I for some reason assumed was always ten seconds away from happening.
This time I’m not actually going to the bathroom, I’m going into the other room and really quickly opening up the browser and really quickly going to Namespot and logging in and seeing if I have new messages. Twice I don’t. One time I have a message, but it’s from one of those porn-website robots represented by a fake girl with a fake profile.
The third time I get back from the bathroom, Eric says, “Are you feeling okay?” I’ve been drinking a ton of Mountain Dew to make it more plausible that I have to keep going to the bathroom, and pretty soon, I actually do have to go.
In my house, my dad’s home office, where the computer is, is right across from my bedroom, where Eric and I are working. My dad never works here. It’s from the weeklong period when he was considering quitting his job and day-trading from home, but then all those day traders started killing themselves, and he decided to keep doing what he’s doing, which I think has something to do with computers. On my way back from legitimately going to the bathroom, I break down and stop in a fourth time. I really quickly open the browser and really quickly go to Namespot and log in. This time, an annoying banner ad starts playing this scream-o music. It is loud and dumb and definitely not the sound of me peeing or flushing or getting more Mountain Dew. Eric comes in to see what the deal is.
“Are you on Namespot?”
“What? Yeah. Uhm …”
“Is that you on Namespot?”
“Yeah. Uhm. It’s. Uhm. There’s like, things you can only see … if you have a profile. Things on … other people’s profiles. I thought it would give us, uh. More shit to make fun of.”
“Alright. Don’t get raped. There are an incredible amount of rapists on there.”
“I don’t think it works like that, dude. Some guy is not going to jump out of the USB port and just start raping me.”
“That gives me an idea for a character,” Eric says, and goes back to my room.
I hit REFRESH. A little envelope icon appears below my half-assed self-portrait. I have a message. The subject is “party.” It’s from “christine’s cliché screen name.” There is an accent on the e in cliché and everything. I think about how every Namespot profile represents a unique and wonderful individual, and how Eric and I have maybe been too quick to judge, and how everything in the world is aggressively fine.
Drama party. I haven’t been to many parties in high school so I don’t know what to expect but I don’t expect this. I guess I expect like a high-school-movie party, with lots of kids who look like they’re thirty passing around red cups and a big kitchen island stacked with liquor and an Asian kid in a puffy neon jacket wearing inexplicable goggles on his forehead who pretends to be black the entire time. But there aren’t any of those things.
What there is is a DJ, or really, a kid with two laptops and some speakers on a table. There are Claire and those girls I met earlier and Ryan, the guy I met earlier, and they’re all in the living room where some couches have been pushed aside, along with lots of other kids, some kids who I recognize from IHOP, and some who, if they go to our school, have been holed up in the drama department the entire time, and they’re all dancing. Like, really dancing. Guys with girls and girls with girls and occasionally guys with guys. That doesn’t freak me out so much as the sight of people my own age dancing. Not at a school dance, either, which I also have zero experience with. A girl I don’t know lets me in and I stand there gaping for a few minutes as a song I don’t really know but am sure I hate plays. And a roomful of mostly girls and a few guys dance just to dance. I guess they look like idiots.
There is this one kid I notice, way nerdier than me or Eric, and he is dancing his ass off. I mean, not that I look nerdy, I think more than anything I try not to look like anything, to be not there to be noticed, but this kid looks like how I feel like I come off: fat and with a gross teenage beard and an anime T-shirt. Not that I am fat or have a gross beard or an anime T-shirt either. But this kid is just breaking it the fuck down. I am simultaneously grossed out and embarrassed for him and in complete awe. This is nothing I can process. I make for the kitchen.
Like I said, there’s no kitchen island full of booze. Doesn’t seem to be any alcohol anywhere. There’s some snacks laid out, some pizza and sodas. I don’t see Christine anywhere, and the only other people I know are dancing in the living room to what is now a song about butts. And even if the people I sort of know noticed me they’d only know me as the kid from lunch on Thursday with the controversial friend and we wouldn’t have anything to talk about. I eat pizza, trying not to get any on my brother’s button-down shirt. I am the only person in the house not writhing and sweating to the song about butts, besides the DJ who’s playing the song about butts. Suddenly I want this to be a normal Friday night and I want to be in Eric’s bedroom or my bedroom, the two of us swearing and drawing zombies or just fucking around with no one to impress. I regret telling him I couldn’t come over because my dad was taking us to Outback. I would forgive him for not letting us explore more of his secret just to thank him for not being a weird drama person whose friend I want to make out with.
The back door slides open. One of the shorter, fatter girls I met at lunch the other day comes in, followed by Christine. Before I left the house tonight I realized people probably think about what they wear to a party before they leave the house, so I decided not to wear my usual black T-shirt and went up to my brother’s room and took one of his button-down shirts. I am a monkey with a Namespot profile and a button-down shirt, I thought on the bus on the way here.
Christine definitely looks like she thought about what to wear before she left the house.
“He’s an asshole,” Christine says to the girl. “Bottom line.”
The girl nods. “Thanks,” she says, and Christine and the girl hug. I grab for a napkin to make sure my face is clean. The girl heads for the living room. Even having just gotten done crying she is more ready to dance than I am.
“Hey!” Christine says. “You made it!”
“Hey,” I say, “yeah.”
“Thanks for coming,” she says. “These parties are getting really same-y, I thought I’d spice things up.”
“Same-y?”
“Yeah, like, the same thing every time. They can be pretty fun, I guess. They’re not like stupid football parties, with, like, jocks and beer and misogyny.”
I don’t know how she thought I would spice things up. I don’t know where she got that from. It seems like to spice things up you bring a hardcore band to a party full of museum donors, or a hooker to a Vatican function. Bringing a quiet nerd to a party full of loud theater dorks does not seem like spicing things up. But I don’t complain. Or say anything. I should say something.
“How are you?”
“Great! Really great. Sorry if you had to wait around in here. Must’ve been awkward. I had to help Becca … she just broke up with Mike. The DJ. He played Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls and he got a pretty big head.”
“Yeah, I could see how that could happen.” I don’t see how that could happen. I don’t know who Nathan Detroit is. In the other room, the song about butts reaches its conclusion and cross-fades into a song that was popular when all of us were in middle school. The cross-fade is courtesy of Mike who got a big head when he played Nathan Detroit, which you will agree is inevitable if you know anything about who Nathan Detroit is.
“So, Darren! What’s your story?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, what’s your deal? What do you DO?”
I go to school, I want to say. What do any of us do? But I don’t think that’s the answer she’s looking for. And the actual answer, that I am developing what is now a TV series culminating in a movie trilogy interspersed with books and graphic novels with any remaining holes in the epic filled in by a massively multiplayer online game, and my partner in this is my best friend who can’t sleep and never has to—that answer I’m not ready to give yet.
“I, uhm. I read? And draw.” I don’t want “I draw” to read as “I doodle” so I think maybe I should say “I’m an artist” but I don’t want to say “I’m an artist.” I do think of myself as an artist, and I also think of myself as a science-fiction visionary and I also think I’d make a great boyfriend but I don’t want to say any of those things out loud to anybody. “I draw, and—”
“RIGHT!” she says. “I have a confession to make. I like, looked at your profile for a while after I sent you the message about the party. And that profile picture … did you draw that?”
“Uhm. Yeah.”
“Oh my God. It’s. Amazing.”
“Really?”
“Yes! Are you kidding? It’s so good and accurate and I don’t know…. You’re a brilliant artist. If the rest of your stuff is even half that good, I’m jealous, because that means you’re a brilliant artist.”
“Don’t thank me! And you like Leonard Cohen? I thought nobody liked Leonard Cohen except for me and my mom.”
Leonard Cohen is one of the artists I put on there to seem eclectic. I know about him because of my brother and my brother doesn’t even really like him, but his ex-girlfriend who was a couple years older than him and broke up with him when she went away to college burned him a Leonard Cohen CD before she graduated. The only time I ever heard Leonard Cohen or saw my brother listen to Leonard Cohen was after she’d left when we were driving to the movies and he put in the CD and started crying and then made a U-turn and drove out into the desert so he could shoot the CD with a paintball gun. I try to remember what it sounded like.
“Yeah, he’s so … quiet. You really have to listen,” I say. “And the lyrics.”
“I know, right?” Christine says. “Oh my God, you must think I’m some kind of stalker or something.”
“No I don’t,” I say.
“Well, good. And didn’t it say you’d only had a profile for like a day?”
I am found out. The beat of the song from the other room is so loud it’s almost like a physical thing, so I think about trying to hide behind it until I can escape. She will think about how weird it is that she saw me at IHOP and then again on Monday and how I didn’t get a Namespot profile until I told her I had one and how the stalkers she’s joking about are real, and she’s looking at one.
“Did your profile get hacked or something? That happened to Claire one time.”
“No,” I say, relieved to be given the out. “I’ve never had one. But then I figured, I guess I should get one. You know … for the art.” I have no idea what I mean by that. “To be honest with you, I think Namespot is sorta shallow.”
“I totally agree with you! It’s like, everyone thinks they’re so unique, like, people have Namespot profiles instead of personalities anymore, and Namespot interactions instead of REAL interactions, you know what I mean? And people fight more in real life about what happens on Namespot than they do about what happens in real life. When Claire got her profile hacked … THAT was a snafu,” Christine says. When Christine sent me the message about the party, I went and looked at her profile. I think she put more effort into it than Eric and I put into the entire TimeBlaze saga. But she did use the word snafu.
The song that was popular when we were all in middle school fades out and another song fades up. A few people filter into the kitchen and start filling glasses with ice and water from a Brita pitcher.
“Hey Christine. Hey person,” says one of the girls.
“This is Darren,” Christine says.
“Hey Darren,” the girl says. “Chris, just FYI, Becca is like, a wreck.”
“I know. We talked.”
“Okay, because she was dancing for like a second and then she went and locked herself in the bathroom.”
“Are you sure she didn’t just go to the bathroom?”
“She told me she was going to LOCK herself in the bathroom.”
“Oh GOD,” Christine says. She puts down her drink and looks at me. “I’m so sorry. Drama kids equal drama. We’re more obnoxious than we realize. Hang out?”
I nod. I don’t know what else I’m going to do. I’m definitely not going to dance. The song is a techno remix of a song sung by an American Idol champion from like two years ago.
“Okay,” Christine says. “Be right back.”
Christine goes, leaving me, the artist with whom she shares an opinion about the vapidity of Namespot, alone. I’m not bothered. I spend a few minutes putting handfuls of pretzels together with handfuls of M&Ms and eating them. It’s something Eric and I do. I go to pour myself some Dr. Pepper. I have an unpleasant flashback and pour Mountain Dew instead. I eat more pizza. Eventually, I get bored in the kitchen, and it’s awkward being the only person staying in there while everybody else comes and goes for water or food or to whisper secrets in each others’ ears before going back to the dance floor. So I go out to the living room.
Mike is bobbing up and down in front of one of his laptops. His head does not seem especially big but he’s wearing a baseball hat so it’s hard to tell. He does seem like kind of a cock, just from the way he’s bobbing up and down. People start hooting and stop dancing to look at something. Two girls in the middle of the room are making out. People are taking pictures. One of the girls is not really attractive at all and the other one is not not attractive. I wonder which is the one with the lesbian switch she can turn on and off. Camera phones click. Eventually that stops and I take a seat on the couch, feeling awkward as hell but not awkward enough to dance. Some of the girls are amazing-looking.
Claire comes out of the crowd and sits down next to me. “Hey, what was your name?”
“Darren!” I have to shout.
“Oh. Your friend was a real asshole to me the other day.”
“Yeah, he’s kind of an awkward … he’s kind of awkward!” I shout.
“Is he here?” she asks.
“No!”
“Good,” Claire says, “and no matter what Christine tells you, do NOT audition for Hendershaw’s ‘theater piece.’ It is going to suck.”
“Okay,” I say.
A girl appears next to Claire and whispers in her ear. Actually, she’s yelling, but I can’t hear what she’s saying. Claire giggles. “Yes! Absolutely! Yes! Bye, Darryl!” She and the girl make their way around the dancers to Mike’s DJ table and lean over and yell in his ears. Mike nods. Claire and the girl high-five. Mike fades out the American Idol song and a song fades in that doesn’t sound like it belongs here, all horns, but not the obnoxious bouncy Muppet-ska kind. The entire room goes nuts and everybody clears the dance floor. Suddenly where I’m sitting is really valuable space as everybody stands around while a few people take places on chairs in the middle of the room. Girls walk through the center and flirt exaggeratedly with guys. They’re doing choreography. The crowd freaks out at every little motion.
As the tempo picks up, girls go into this dance with a lot of kicks, swishing their arms around to indicate what I guess are skirts they don’t actually have. The cameras are out again, so that later when people are uploading their pictures to Namespot, images of two girls making out will go right next to pictures of people who are almost college-age kicking and swishing imaginary skirts.
Gary the fat kid is sitting next to me, clapping and cheering and telling individual dancers to “GO, Tyra! GO, Ashley!,” et cetera. I look over at him.
“What’s this …”
“The HAVANA DANCE!” he screams before I can even get the words out. “From Guys and Dolls, only the greatest production in the history of Theater Division!” Everyone outside of Drama Club calls what these kids do Drama Club. Everyone inside of Drama Club calls it Theater Division.
The horns are really blaring and now the dance is a fake fight. Guys I can tell are gay swing on guys who could fool me. The guys who could fool me swing back. There’s lots of kicking and ducking under kicking. Some guys are kicking people who aren’t there or ducking kicks from people who aren’t there: I guess the entire cast of the greatest production in the history of Theater Division could not make it out to Nicole’s house.
When I came in and saw a roomful of kids dancing I thought a little bit for a second that it looked like fun. Now I want to beat myself up for being anywhere near something like this. Christine aside I really want to be back in my room playing old video games with Eric quoting Weird Al lyrics because it’s honestly less nerdy than this. I look for the kid in the anime shirt so I can ask him for confirmation on that. I let Gary have the couch and go back into the kitchen and then I work up the nerve to go out on the porch and tell Christine I’m leaving.
I slide the back door open and step out onto the back porch. Christine and Becca are sitting on a pool chair. Christine is rubbing Becca’s back. I startle them.
“Hey!” Christine says.
“Hi. Uhm. I think I’m gonna take off.”
“Oh no!” Christine says. “I’m sorry I haven’t…”
“Oh God,” Becca says, “I’m like taking up your time, I’m so sorry, I’m such a time-suck, God …”
“No,” Christine says, “you’re not—” but before she can finish Becca gets up and runs inside, not crying exactly but not far from it.
“I’m sorry,” I say, since we’re apologizing.
“Don’t worry about it,” Christine says.
“Do you want to go talk to her, or …”
“It’s okay,” she says. “I think Becca’s going to cry tonight no matter what happens. Just one of those nights. Anyway, I feel like a complete asshole for just, like, abandoning you to the wolves.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Claire probably told you all sorts of wonderful things about me.”
“She didn’t,” I say, assuming she means “wonderful” sarcastically. “I mean, she told me I shouldn’t audition for Mr…. Hendershaw’s? Piece.”
“Oh. Do you want to?”
“I’m not sure I even know what it is. And also … not really.”
“Well, it’s going to be amazing. But you’re already amazing at your own thing. You probably don’t feel the need to excel in multiple things.”
“I guess I never thought about it.”
“Anyway, sorry for leaving you. I’m a terrible host. Come sit down! Unless you really do have to leave.”
I don’t have to do anything unless it’s not watch kids my own age play-fight to swing music. I have to not watch that. I go sit down next to Christine on the pool chair, wondering if everybody who sits there gets their back rubbed.
“I’m a terrible host,” Christine says. “Well, I guess I’m not really the HOST. I’m a guest. But, I’m like, the host in charge of making sure you have a good time, since I dragged you out.”
“You’re the host of our mini-party,” I say.
“Right. Exactly. I promise we won’t play any trance music at the mini-party.”
“Oh, man! But if you don’t play trance music, nothing at the party will suck!”
Christine laughs. She throws her head back and there is so much of her neck, all white in the moonlight. The moonlight is also glinting off the pool, which is probably freezing.
“Do you guys always eat where I saw you the other day?”
“Yeah,” I say.
It is the last question I have to answer because it turns out if I keep asking her questions I don’t have to talk. She doesn’t mind talking and I don’t mind listening, and it feels like we’re out there a long time and not that much time at all at the same time, and we occasionally break from one of her answers to identify a song playing inside by its bass line pumping through the stucco of the house, and then rag on that song. She unapologetically mentions books. It turns out she has two classes with Tony DiAvalo and thinks he’s a thoroughgoing d-bag. Her words, “thoroughgoing d-bag,” not mine, but I agree. I realize with no small amount of shock that this is a conversation with a non-Eric person that I in no way want to get out of, that I am just enjoying rather than trying to minimize its awkwardness and length. I am interested on a level I imagine Eric is interested on in the things he gets interested in and learns everything about, learning and remembering with zero effort because I actually give a damn.
Pretty soon she has laid her head in my lap. This comes as a surprise to me. I start to get that standing-in-front-of-your-locker-telling-you-I-like-you thing, complete with unmanly trembling I pray she can’t detect. She says something about when it was cool to tie flannel shirts around your waist and I lean down and kiss her.
I don’t think I ever actively imagined what my first kiss would be like. But here’s why I’m at least as big a nerd as the bad-teenage-beard anime guy: I’m pretty sure that whenever I thought about it in passing, it looked like a video game cutscene. In my head it was never at a real time in a real place. What I’m trying to say is I think I always figured it would happen on the deck of a flaming airship after I vanquished a multilimbed squid-god. This is not that. But this is great. It’s real, and my neck really hurts.
“Is your neck awkward like that?” Christine says.
It is, so we reposition. Pretty soon we’re making out and we don’t stop to guess the songs based on their bass lines and after a while Becca comes out with some other crisis and Christine has to go inside and I say goodnight and take the bus home before I can screw anything up, Christine’s phone number saved in the cell phone my dad pays the bills on.
I get off the bus and walk back to my house, jackrabbits scattering across people’s lawns. My brother is sitting in front of my house underneath the porch light in a lawn chair. He is wearing oversized sunglasses and no shirt, drinking beer from a can with an open case at his feet.
“Hey,” I say on my way into the house.
“Beach party,” he says, “Alan and them left, though,” as though I’d asked him “What’d you do tonight?” He says: “What’d you do tonight?”
“Nothing.”
“You go over to that kid’s house?” He means Eric.
“No. Party.”
“You went to a party? Oi, ja hear that?” he says in his obnoxious Cockney thing, addressing no one in particular. “Ee went to a fook-in’ partee!”
“Yup.”
“You want a beer?”
“Uhm … sure.” I made out with a girl. I am drinking a beer with my brother on the front porch of my house. The old world I knew is dead.
He takes one out of the box and hands it to me. I open it and sit on the concrete. It’s cold. I keep forgetting to be happy about what happened earlier, but then I remember.
“Is Dad coming back tonight?”
“I dunno. He left money. You can order something if you’re hungry.”
“I ate at the thing.”
“Whose thing was it? I didn’t hear about anything.”
“Some drama kid party.”
“Oh, a fag party.”
“Fuck you. I made out with a girl.”
“Ferreals?”
“Yeah.”
“Nice! JA FUCK HER?” my brother says, and launches forward in his seat. His beer foams over and it’s awkward and I think he senses it’s not a good idea to be so completely himself in all situations. “Seriously, though. Nice. I’m through here. Top me off.”
We drink the rest of the beers. There are eight left. It’s the third time I’ve ever been drunk; the first time was a couple years ago when my brother had a Pimps and Hos party when my dad was gone and the second time was at my mom’s wedding.
“I don’t see that kid here much anymore. That kid.”
“Eric?”
“Whatever. Big fuckin’ eyes. Nerd. Yeah.”
“Yeah, mostly I go over to his house.”
“Good. You guys fuck with … Alan again, like that time? He’ll kill you. I don’t care as much.”
“Okay.”
“That’s a weird fuckin’ kid. He wanted roofies? Fuck is his deal?”
“He’s like, I dunno, an honors student and stuff.”
“That does not even begin to explain the roofies.”
“You had them.”
“You WANTED ’em.”
“It was for an experiment.”
“No girls involved.”
“Story of your life.”
“I kissed a girl tonight!”
“Good. Me and yer pa were startin’ ta worry.”
Crickets chirp. I kill my beer and open another one.
“What fuckin’ experiment?”
“Okay, get this: Eric can’t sleep.”
“Insomnia? Like Fight Club?”
“No, like, he can’t sleep AT ALL.” I think about trying to explain it further. Then it occurs to me I probably shouldn’t have said anything.
“The fuck?”
“Or … that’s what he tells me. I don’t know. It’s weird.”
“You’re fucking-A right it’s weird.”
“He’s like, joking I think.”
“You’re fucking-A right it’s weird.” My brother is quiet for a long time, then he says, “Huh.”
“What?”
“That’s a weird kid.”
“Yeah, he says … he says a lot of, y’know, stuff. He’s got a big imagination.”
“Huh.”
I get up to go inside. Though I shouldn’t have said anything, obviously, the armor on Eric’s secret is that it’s too strange to be believed. “Is that my shirt?” my brother says.
“Yeah.”
“Well gimme it, it’s freezing out here.”
