8
A typical day last year, before Eric: I walk home right after school. August through October and March through May my T-shirt is a sweat rag by the time I get there. When I get up to my room I take my shirt off and look into the mirror for a while, not in a vain way, just to see what the fuck is going on with my torso, scrawny and fat at the same time, has to be the worst torso for miles. Then I might turn on MTV, again not because I like what’s going on there but simply to gape in wonder at what the fuck is wrong with everybody, and occasionally there’ll be some stupidly hot girl on, writhing around on the top of a car. I go downstairs and eat everything in the kitchen and get an enormous glass of soda with no ice because it’s cold enough from the fridge. I whale on kids and grown men on Xbox Live for a while, all of their voices modified by the presets to sound like robots or monsters. Once the headset starts to make my ears sore I go back upstairs to my room and turn on my clock radio, NPR, and listen lying underneath the fan if it’s something interesting, and if it’s really boring news, particularly from the Middle East, I might zone out and fantasize in a half-assed way about one or two girls from school. For some reason my fantasies work best if they’re half-plausible and for some reason two girls from my algebra class falling into after-school lesbianism is more realistic than them throwing me any, so while a reporter drones on about the Gaza Strip I might think about a couple members of the girls’ volleyball team making each other in the back of a Camry. After that and cleaning up after that I’ll probably fall asleep until Marketplace comes on at six and foggily watch two syndicated Simpsons episodes or just keep sleeping until I’m hungry. If it’s Thursday, my dad or my brother might knock on my door because we’re going to Outback. If it isn’t, they probably won’t, and we’ll each fend for ourselves in the kitchen or in the case of my dad and my brother, out somewhere else.
After Eric and before Christine, a typical afternoon is going over to Eric’s house to talk about ideas and swear, and after Christine a typical afternoon is going over to Christine’s house to fool around, and my phone that used to be a silent brick I kept in my pocket to remind me how lonely I was is now ringing every ten seconds with calls from Christine if I’m with Eric, in which case I usually go wherever Christine is, and with calls from Eric if I’m with Christine, which I usually ignore.
One time Christine calls and asks if she can come over, but it doesn’t sound like a fun sort of coming over. She had a theater meeting after school so I just went home. I thought about going over to Eric’s but I knew she was going to get out of her meeting at some point and call me, and I feel less bad just avoiding him altogether than going over to his house for an hour then leaving when Christine calls, so I take a way out of school that I know to be different than the one he takes and I catch the bus.
I’m watching a show about bear attacks when Christine calls. “Can I come over,” she says, like words that are preceded by the words “I’m sorry, but…” and after I hang up this dread comes over me like well, here it comes. Sex after school with a girl that can stand you seemed impossible, and it was. The package was mistakenly addressed to you and the real owner is coming to get it. I settle in for a lot more bear attacks. Christine knocks on the front door.
When I open it, she comes in and basically collapses into my arms. She’s been crying and will be again.
“The show is canceled!” she says. Her hair smells good.
“Yeah?”
“The administration, those fucking idiots, they say Mr. Hendershaw can’t put up any new work. It’s too ‘risky.’ It’s not even THAT controversial! If they would read the piece …”
“Yeah, they’re idiots.”
“They ARE idiots. No one understands what he’s trying to do, not the administration, not the parents, not the other kids in TD, fucking assholes …”
“Yeah, they’re assholes.” I’ve never been around Christine crying before. Her tears are hot on the collar of my shirt. I’ve been around Christine being around “other kids in TD” when they’re crying before, so I just try to do what she seems to do, which is just agree with what the person says and then try to get them to look on the bright side.
“Well look at it this way, at least we’ll get to hang out more.”
“What? Fuck you!” Christine pulls away from me and whacks me on the arm.
“What? You said we were gonna be seeing a lot less of each other when you were doing the show and now you aren’t gonna do the show so we won’t be seeing a lot less of each other. That’s all.”
“It’s not just oh, bummer, one less show. I’ve been looking forward to this since forever!”
“It’s not fair,” she says. “I’ve been wanting to do this kind of thing for two years now, this was my chance to do something besides, just like, the typical corny school play, and now …” She starts crying again. For a second I think of what my brother would say if he came home and found me embracing a sobbing girl in the front hallway. Probably something about how I rape lots of girls and she shouldn’t take it personally. I don’t want to be in the front hallway anymore where that sort of thing can happen.
“Do you want to go upstairs?”
“Fucking GOD, Darren! Can you not think about sex for like two seconds and just fucking listen to me?”
“I wasn’t thinking about sex! I was thinking about your musical!”
“It’s not a musical! It’s a fucking experimental theater piece! You know what? I need to go. I need to talk to somebody who listens.”
And pretty soon I get my wish and I’m not talking to a crying girl in the front hallway anymore, except instead of being in my room the crying girl is back in her car headed God knows where. I call her forty or fifty times and leave lots of apologetic voice messages and she’s online later but doesn’t respond to any of my instant messages. She didn’t come over intending to leave me alone with my bear-attack shows but I guess I made sure she did anyway.
“Christine’s okay.”
I’m hoping to have lunch and not think about Christine. I’ve been thinking about Christine all day, hoping to catch her in the hallway and plead my case. I have the beginnings of an apology note in my English notebook. If things get really dire, I have the beginnings of an apology comic in one of my sketchbooks. I have fifty apology voicemails simmering in Christine’s cell phone, or if not physically in her cell phone, then in whatever phone-company computer or server or satellite stores the world’s voicemail. Wherever it is, there are fifty snippets of me saying variations on “Christine, I’m sorry, call me back.” I wonder in negative repetitive patterns about whether or not she’s listened to them or just gone through them one after another hitting “7.” I’ve been hoping for what I can always count on, which is a lunch full of Eric and me debating the virtues of time machines versus wormholes, no matter how I’ve treated him. And now he’s telling me Christine is okay.
“Huh?”
“Christine. I mean, she’s nice.”
“Oh. Yeah. Why do you say that?”
“She started talking to me via Instant Messenger. She said you’d had some sort of fight and she wanted to get an outside perspective on what you’re thinking.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That you’re an asshole.”
“Fuck you!”
“No. I didn’t. I told her that you’re really smart but you hide it, and as a side effect of that maybe you end up hiding your emotions as well, and so if you seemed less than demonstrative that’s what that’s about and you can’t help it.”
“Oh. Wow. How’d she take it?”
“Okay I guess. She said she’d think about it.”
“Okay.”
“She also said I was ‘insightful.’”
“What does demonstrative mean?”
“You know what demonstrative means. This is what I’m talking about.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“We ended up talking for the rest of the night. She stays up late. She’s pretty nice.”
“Yeah. I like her. I hope she doesn’t still want to kill me.”
Eric looks tired, I think. Then again, he did say he stayed up all night. Then again, he always stays up all night and has forever.
Christine sends me a text message in seventh period. She says we should go see a movie and bring Eric. I’m back in and not a terrible person anymore. Just like that, I get to have boobs and cyborgs and I don’t have to choose.
We go to see this indie movie, The Paucity of Feeling. It’s the sort of movie Christine likes, I guess because she’s smart, and the sort of movie I say I like because I like to watch Christine being smart and I like it when she likes things, but I am coming to suspect that, despite my best efforts, I don’t actually like these kinds of movies. It’s playing at this art-house theater that used to be a real-people theater when I was a kid and my mom would take my brother and I there because it was the only movie theater in town when she was growing up, and I think because it was close to the mall and we could make a day of it. Now there are a bunch more movie theaters, big multiplex situations that remind you of learning your times tables (they all end in numbers divisible by 8: Desert Ridge 8, MesaPlex 16, Vista Crest 24), and three or four more malls, but this place is still the place you go if you want your girlfriend to think you’re smart.
Christine picks me up first and then we pick up Eric. We are making fun of the hip-hop station’s station-identification breaks before Eric gets in the car.
“YOUR HOME-HOME-HOME FOR TODAY’S HIP-HOP HITS,” I say.
“He sounds like he’s eighty years old. That guy does the announcements for every station.”
“YOUR HOME-HOME-HOME FOR YESTERDAY’S RAGTIME HITS,” I say.
We fuck around like that waiting for Eric; it takes him a little while to stumble out of the house after I call him.
“Sorry I’m late,” he says. “Dinner tonight was a total IQ.”
Christine laughs and says, “I know what you mean. I was working on this French paper tonight … complete IQ all the way.” Eric laughs.
“What does IQ mean?” I ask. “I mean, I know what it means … like, normally, but…”
“IQ. It’s this thing we came up with the other night on IM,” Christine says. “In honors history, Mr. Webber called Vietnam an ‘intractable quagmire.’ So we started calling things IQs if they are, in fact, intractable quagmires.”
“Britney Spears’s career. IQ,” Eric says.
“My parents’ marriage … IQ,” Christine says.
“Ever getting our school on year-round schedule. IQ,” Eric says.
“Driver’s tests, total IQ,” Christine says. “Not that you would know.” She smiles at me.
I ignore the slight and try to play along. “Uhm, my brother, there’s an IQ if I ever saw one.”
“You’re saying your brother is a conflict mired in complications which any form of struggle only aggravates?” Eric says.
“I don’t think you understand how this game works,” Christine says.
We pay for our tickets and go into the lobby. There’s a café area around the concession stand. Marlee and Antonia, these two girls wearing big puffy hats that resemble muffins who don’t go to our school but who Christine knows from their blogs, are sitting there eating pastries that look like their hats, notebooks open. Antonia flags down Christine. Normally I just stand around and look dumb while Christine and Antonia and Marlee talk fast. Tonight at least I’ll have somebody to stand around and look dumb with.
“Ohmigod,” says Antonia. “We just saw the Godard retrospective.”
“Seminal,” Marlee says. “SEMINAL.”
“I’ve been meaning to see his stuff,” Christine says, “but I haven’t yet.”
“You have to,” says Antonia, “you absolutely have to.”
“You really should, he’s pretty great,” Eric says.
“You know Godard?” says Marlee.
“A little,” Eric says. “I went through a phase.”
“What’s your favorite?”
“Well, it’s a toss-up between Breathless and …”
I lose the thread for a little while and focus on feeling betrayed by Eric, who is supposed to be a dude with me. Then I see my window.
“… just like Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress was ripped off by Lucas with Star Wars,” Eric says.
“Speaking of Star Wars, did you guys know that in the first draft of the script, Luke Skywalker was called Annakin Starkiller?”
Everybody, even my girlfriend, even my best friend, looks at me like blood just started gushing from my mouth. In fact, I think they would prefer blood was coming out of my mouth, instead of these stupid words that are trying so hard. In fact, I would prefer blood was coming out of my mouth, because then I’d have an out from this stupid evening.
“What film are you guys seeing?” Marlee asks.
“The Paucity of Feeling,” Christine says.
“I saw it when I interned at the film festival,” Antonia says. “You’re going to love it.”
They’re called “movies,” not “films,” you fucking muffin-hats, I think as we make our way to Theater 2.
The movie, the “film,” is a lot of shots of bridges and rosaries swinging from rearview mirrors and a guy with a beard is very mean to a French girl. It doesn’t start where it starts or end where it ends for any particular reason and I keep wanting zombies to jump in from the margins of the frame and eat everybody but they don’t. Everyone stares at the ocean for two hours, which forces us to as well, even if we don’t want to, even if we would rather watch a thing in which a thing happens.
Usually when these movies are over I wait for Christine to weigh in and if she hated it I hate it with her and if she liked it I say, “Ah, interesting.” But tonight I’ll have Eric on my side, and we will be able to argue with the authority of two dudes who have conceived of a seventy-hour multimedia sci-fi epic that this movie was a piece of shit.
“Bradgate was right, for once,” Eric says when he comes out of the bathroom.
“Yes, for once,” Christine agrees.
“Who’s Bradgate?”
“The film critic for the Republic,” Eric says.
“Usually he hates movies like this and loves, like, dinosaur island movies,” Christine says.
“But every so often, he picks an art movie to champion, mostly because everybody else is. He gave this one a good review.”
“Which actually had me worried,” Christine says. “But he was right.”
“So you guys liked it?”
Christine and Eric look at each other.
“You didn’t?” Christine asks.
“Uhm …” I say, “it was interesting.”
On the walk to Christine’s car I listen as they dissect motifs and symbolism and mise-en-scène and Eric, whom I thought was loyal to clones and alien broods and movies that are actually, you know, about something, reminds me that while I jerk off and sleep, he stays up being interested in things. Christine drives and Eric sits in the front seat and the kid sits in the back.
A typical afternoon in the Eric/Christine/Darren trio goes like this: I’m either at Eric’s house or Christine’s house or one of them is at my house. At last it seems I don’t have to choose, like my time is perfectly balanced. I’ll be drawing the sails on an ultralight skiff designed to ride on the surface of the sun, and Eric will be contemplating ways we can cut down the length of our titles (we’ve gotten them down to just two colons) when Eric’s cell phone beeps. Before Christine I never heard Eric’s phone ring because I don’t think it ever rang when I wasn’t with Eric because I’m the only one who ever called. Eric flips his phone open and says to me, “What’s a seven-letter synonym for perspicacity? Christine is beating me at this word game,” and before I can answer, he’s texting her back, not that I could answer. Or I’ll be at Christine’s house doing something to her I think I’m actually getting really good at, considering my previous lack of experience, and Christine’s phone will ring, and she’ll listen to the voicemail immediately after we finish, and she’ll say to me, “Eric says you said the cutest thing at lunch,” and before I can ask if Eric really described whatever thing I said as “cute” she’s calling him back to find out what the cute thing was.
Or the three of us are together.
Or it’s just me alone.
