94: heavy
When I am twelve, at the end of my year, I have conquered many of the groups I set out to conquer. The freak-adjacent girls with their lipgloss and soccer-player boyfriends, that love INXS and love me for my weirdness and homosexuality, are such an unexpected boon that I will remember their names and several of their outfits twenty years later.
One of the soccer-player boyfriends, with a blonde weightline and perfect jeans every single day, names me one of his best friends before I leave town, moving away once again, shocking me further. Joel. For him specifically I have invented the concept of blowjobs, and don't see a distinction, or even really a connection to the world of sex: Just something that seems like a good idea, like etiquette, like a natural expression. Thanks for being my friend, and so hot at the same time.
After winter break a girl calls me a "ho" across the courtyard, and I picture for some reason a wagon wheel. When somebody explains it to me, I'm confused: I can only wish. She must not know the word either. All it means is that we aren't friends anymore. I don't mind. Her bangs are six inches high and crinkly as spiderlegs.
On the last day of school, the thrumming of the wild inside the walls is so deafening that the teachers finally let us out, open the doors and blow the bell, and we go screaming onto the dusty intramural field, caught in a madness, throwing down bookbags and dancing wildly, as some bright soul plays music over the public address system, and we finally all grasp that feeling we'd seen so many times in movies and television, that School's Out feeling we'd all ached to feel authentically, for ourselves, one day.
I have spent the morning between classes trading books with nerds, disappointing some by having forgotten to return their stuff and being disappointed in my turn. I am ready to go wild with the freaks. I have committed myself to the idea of getting lost in the city, of just disappearing and letting my mother search the streets all night before returning home. I have no idea how lonely and fearful her life, her parenthood, has been. I only want to dance, to see the strange clubs and grottos I've heard so much about. And as the students disperse, picked up by mortifying parents and impressive older siblings, I see it's all coming down: The only people I recognize, on lawn and field and courtyard, are the freaks. They are gathering.
I still have an hour in which I'm not doing anything wrong -- which on any other day would mean sitting in the lawn or against the school, waiting for my mother and hoping no teacher or administrator happened upon me and told me to scatter elsewhere -- and I'm painfully aware of the time passing as I make small talk with the leftover freaks, waiting for the offer, preparing myself to manipulate or demand it, as our numbers dwindle.
A cheap car screams up into the parking lot, and Shawna appears out of nowhere, running up to the window. There is a laughing gaggle, all ages, inside, waving to her and grasping at her hands from inside. She turns toward me, in the light, and I see that the driver is Robbie. I wave, excitedly, and he looks at me as though I am something misplaced, turning to Shawna for confirmation that we know each other. She whispers something, and he nods curtly, turning off the car. She grins, refusing to look at me, and steps aside. As Robbie walks toward me, I can see the headlines:
Clueless Pre-Teen Murdered By Awesome Faggot
Murder Victim Abandoned To His Death By Nerds & Soccer Players
Killer Responds: "He Didn't Really Get Robert Smith"
The Wages Of Hypocrisy: Drama Class Justice
"Only Liked Sinead O'Connor's Singles," Explains One Mercy-Killer
As he comes close, I make a pathetic attempt to pretend not only insouciance, but some sort of hysterical blindness. It's a sunny day, but not so sunny that the godlike approach of the only person on Earth that Shawna Caviness actually thinks is cool would go unnoticed.
"You're James?" He leans down, squinting himself, leaning heavily on his hands, on his thighs. He is wearing hightops not entirely unlike my own, but vastly and uncannily... Better. Through the hole at one knee of his jeans -- crepe-weak, velvet-soft, acid-washed; holding tenderly sinew and parts I barely recognize -- I can see his olive skin, and on that skin I can see a single freckle, and I want to kiss it, here on the ground with my legs crossed, or draw a picture of it, or sing it a song. I am as incapable of looking up at his face as I am of getting away. I nod.
"Jimmy, but yeah. James. Yes, James. I'm James." I sound idiotic. He doesn't mind.
He holds out one hand: "I'm Robbie. I don't think we've actually met. Formally."
I take the hand, wary of a sudden attack, and chance a look up into his face. He is more beautiful in person than in imagination. There is a quirk in his smile I never knew people had, and could not supply to my image of him. He is smiling; he is grinning: Why? I am terrified.
Robbie takes my other hand, and I get nervous that he'll try to help me up off the ground. I am strainingly heavy, inert and rock-bound. I don't want him to injure himself or, worse, mention affectionately or hatefully how heavy I am, so I stand of my accord. He doesn't let go, and he doesn't hit me. We stand in a middle school parking lot in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the United States, in the sun, holding hands. Everything in his eyes is meant to reassure me: Everything is going to be okay.
"What are you doing tonight?" he asks, and invites me summarily to come "party" somewhere with Shawna and the rest of them. My lip-gloss girls will be there too, and their brusque boyfriends, my friends. I open my mouth, unwilling to let go of us hands, suddenly brave enough to swing our arms between us like the London bridges, pretending to consider. He cocks his head, not pleading but coaxing, and it feels like mountain rain.
Behind Robbie, past the sunlight in his hair and the stubble on his chin, I see the vague, worldly concrete shape of my mother's car sliding into view. I am too young, too fat, too clueless and too angry for Robbie to know me, yet. I am not the person he thinks I am, not yet. I don't want him to ever find that out. So I swing his hands again, feeling at the rough guitar calluses on his fingers, and memorize the outline of his collarbone. I finally understand the Cure, I think.
I shake my head silently, with what I hope is a grin both apologetic and mysterious.