Another Confession, and a bit more "Confessions"
Today's Confession: Yesterday I got lost on my way to work. I've been working at that library for, like, five months now. Before that, I'd been going to that library for the past ten years or so.
The problem is I only know one route and yesterday it was blocked off for construction or some nonsense. I figured it wouldn't be too hard since I know the intersection it's on, but yeah, I managed to take the wrong turn not once, not just twice, but three times.
So yeah. I got lost in a three block area that I go to almost every day. If we're ever in a situation where we have to depend on my sense of direction, we're doomed.
Today's installment comes from Chapter 4, which I am now realizing is kind of long (almost 7,000 words). Maybe I'll do half today, half tomorrow. Or all of it at once, who knows.
Chapter Four
The Portion of the Book Where I Rag Mercilessly on the Other Guys, or: Shooting Synchronized Fish in a Bedazzled Barrel (Meet the Guys)
Mel was not down with the idea that I would be dropping out (“If we have to a delinquent he can’t be a dropout, too.”), and eventually it was decided that RJ and I would move into the city and stay with Jake in his grandmother’s house and enroll in the Las Vegas school district for our senior year so that the group could rehearse.
Mr. Stein was a little less than enthused, given the general reputation of Las Vegas schools, but he relented. RJ had been taking care of himself for way too long to start taking orders from his dad now, and they both probably knew it.So, Riley drove his Jeep Cherokee up to Freeland one weekend and we went around to RJ’s, Annie’s and John’s houses to collect all our stuff.
John awkwardly clapped me on the back, but Annie hugged me long and hard. “Take care of yourself, and take care of RJ,” she said.
“Duh,” I said, and she laughed. “You don’t have to worry, you know. Janie’s gonna be around, and Billy’s been talking about moving there soon, too.”
She smiled a little funny and said, “Jesse-baby, I will always worry about you. You sure this is something you wanna do?”
I shrugged evasively. “I don’t wanna stay in Freeland.” And I wanted to sing. Jake had me believing that I really could, but it seemed corny to say.
Living with Jake wasn’t so bad. After an awkward adjustment period when he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be in charge of us or not, he decided he wasn’t and spent most of his time when we weren’t rehearsing in the spare bedroom he’d converted to a studio. He always seemed to have money despite only working nights and weekends DJ-ing at a club downtown (he confessed to us once that the same loaded grandmother who left him the house had also left him a substantial amount of cash, which he was mostly living on at the moment), and he didn’t care what we did so long as it didn’t effect rehearsals.
We figured out pretty quick that Jake couldn’t cook at all and had, in fact, been subsisting on take out, so RJ took over in the kitchen and thus became Jake’s Favorite Person Ever (I’ve never seen someone so grateful for a grilled cheese sandwich). He kept us well stocked on pasta and meat loaf and seemed genuinely happy to do it.
School wasn’t so bad, either, surprisingly enough. It was still school, and I still felt pretty stupid a lot of the time as I struggled to catch up from eleven years of not caring and no one caring about me, but no one knew me and it was easier to stay out of trouble then I’d thought it would be. RJ made a lot of friends and I mostly just tagged along with him. The only annoying part was that Lewis, who was a freshman at the same school, insisted on eating lunch with us every day. He and RJ were hitting it right off, which irritated me a little, mostly because I still found the little prick annoying.
The worst part was when Jake made us quit smoking. Both RJ and me had been stealing cigarettes pretty regularly from wherever we could get them for years-he got them from his dad and from the gas station, I got them from all of my older siblings. Billy and Jane had even been known to bribe us with cigarettes if there was something they wanted. To us it wasn’t a big deal.
Jake wasn’t having it. “You’re vocalists, now,” he said, “you can’t be doing anything that might damage your voices.” And for once he was dead serious and completely focused-we couldn’t distract him or divert him. “No more cigarettes or you’re out of the group.”
It was irritatingly much easier for RJ than it was for me. He passed over his last pack without a complaint and, other than a bit of jitteriness and a marked increase in coffee intake (which was frankly frightening, since he was bad enough without the caffeine), didn’t even seem to miss it. (I didn’t find out until years later, in the middle of some interview, that he’d been sneaking cigarettes on the side for years. The little traitor, I could have killed him, that whole time I thought we were in it together.)
Me, I was in hell. I hadn’t considered myself an addict until I had to quit, and it didn’t help that they made me give up chewing tobacco at the same time (I’d picked the habit up from John and my old quest to be as much like him as possible. I tried to argue that dip couldn’t affect my voice at all, but all four of them-even RJ who I’d thought would be on my side-came right back with “yellow teeth” and “disgusting habit” and “mouth cancer” and I pretty much lost.)
I chewed my lips raw and bloody and snarled at anyone and anything that came within five feet of me. I itched. I couldn’t sleep. I found myself just sticking stuff in my mouth like some kind of retarded toddler, pencils, toothpicks, soft drink straws from Riley’s diner, just to have something to suck on and chew on. In class one day I chewed my pen so hard the ink capsule busted and I spent the rest of the day with a bright blue mouth and got in my first fight since leaving Freeland with some nameless kid who thought it was funny.
The patches just made me more irritable and the guys were all tiptoeing around me. Finally, Riley, who’d been campaigning to get his mom to quit for years, went out and got me that Nicorette gum stuff. Worked like a charm. I used to go through a few packs of the stuff a day until Riley found out while we were touring in Europe-apparently I was supposed to have weaned myself off it or something-and made me switch to Dentine.
We rehearsed after school every day, in the garage of Jake’s house, which he’d partially converted to a studio. The air conditioning in there was spotty at best, and we sweated through our clothes while Jake taught us the songs and the choreography he wanted us to know.
It was a weird world to live in, and strangely isolating. Already there was no one else who knew, just me and these four other guys, dancing in a garage in the middle of Las Vegas.
***
RJ: RJ and I shared a bedroom, and it was pretty much like the sleepovers we used to have when we were little kids, only we were both in beds instead of moth eaten Transformers sleeping bags, and we made fewer sheet forts. At first I was honestly a little worried about the guy-wandering the streets in the middle of the night because he couldn’t sleep was a much worse idea in the city than it had been in Freeland, and it had never exactly been a sign of brilliance-but RJ has always been way tougher than most people tend to think, including me. He adapts and he survives, no matter what.
Still, I really don’t know what I was worried about. Las Vegas is a weird fucking town and RJ is a weird fucking kid. In Freeland he drew stares, but in the city of neon he was just another brightly dressed kid. He bopped along to music playing in his head, because he couldn’t afford an iPod, and he still stole packs of glow sticks and wore them around his wrists like bracelets, even though he’d stopped going to the parties.
He came home one day with a lifetime supply of tootsie pops (which the five of us tore through in a matter of days) and his hair dyed bright green, still gelled up in thin, stiff spikes all over.
I took one look at him and spat the milk I’d been drinking all over the kitchen, I was laughing so hard.
“Mel’s gonna yell about image again,” Lewis predicted with a sigh, but even he had to agree that it was pretty cool.
“Whatever,” RJ shrugged, grinning. “It isn’t permanent.” And it did wash out pretty quickly, though he ended up looking like moss was growing on his head for a few weeks afterward. No one but RJ would be able to pull it off.
Shortly after we moved in he went on a pranking spree, duct-taping doors closed and putting a barrier of cellophane between the fridge door and the food and smearing toothpaste on the toilet seat. He got me plenty of times, because I’ve always been a really easy target for that kind of thing, and every single time I’d shout at him loud enough to shake the house and draw Jake out of his studio-room with a scowl on his face for messing up his recording, while RJ giggled like an idiot and took off to hide. Most often though the target was Jake, who was satisfying in his own way, because every single time he tried to put sugar in his coffee and ended up with salt instead he’d just sit there, frowning a little like he was completely and utterly confused.
“Is he trying to kill me off to get more solos or something?” Jake asked me one day, in that perfectly dead pan way of his that made me unsure whether he was joking or being sarcastic or not.
I finished my icy pop and shrugged. “Probably not. More like he’s, like, testing you out, you know?”
Jake didn’t know and I struggled to explain.
“It’s like, you’re new, right?”
Jake frowned. “It’s my house. You guys are the new ones.”
“No, I mean, like, new to RJ. You’re a new person. In his world.”
“Ok?”
“Ok, so he’s trying to figure out how you react to stuff, and if you’re gonna go off on him, and how much he can get away with and stuff.”
“And stuff.”
“He’s just getting used to things, he’ll calm down soon.”
And he did. One day RJ went to Jake’s studio with a grilled cheese and tomato soup offering and spent the next two hours just hanging out and offering suggestions and singing on cue , but mostly just watching, as silent and still as RJ is capable of being, as Jake worked and gradually forgot he was there at all.
After that, RJ and Jake were a little inseparable, in a strange way. RJ would chatter at Jake while Jake sat on a stool in the kitchen, nursing an extra-large cup of coffee and trying to wake up, and RJ would leave offerings of cheap toys from quarter machines at the grocery store in Jake’s studio from time to time.
“What’s he doing now?” Jake asked me eventually, and I rolled his eyes.
“Dude, just don’t worry about it. He’s decided he likes you is all.”
“Your friend is weird.” Coming from Jake this was a little rich, but I couldn’t exactly refute it, so I just shrugged. Jake seemed to actually like the attention anyway, and the toys took up permanent position lining the edge of his keyboard.
One night, after rehearsal and after dinner and after Jake had left for his DJ-ing gig, RJ and I sat up in our room, him on his bed and me on mine. It had been a particularly intense rehearsal, and everyone was frustrated by my continued difficulties with the dancing, especially me. I never thought I would miss Freeland, but at least there I could hurl rocks at shit when I was pissed off without getting the cops called on me (most nights).
“You ever really think we’d end up here, like this?” he asked suddenly, and I remembered a long ago talk on a broken merry-go-round with Janie, her drunk asshole friends defacing the already defaced equipment around us.
“…The boy band is kind of a surprise,” I said after a moment, and he laughed. RJ has always had a laugh like a hyena who got ahold of a machine gun. It’s a little infectious.
“What do you think? You know, like, so far?”
I picked at the threadbare quilt John’s girlfriend Lisa had given to me for the move. It surprised me that she honestly seemed a little sad and worried to see me go. I’d always thought she hated putting up with me three or four nights a week and only did it for John. But maybe she was just going to miss the free childcare.
“I’m never gonna get this fucking dancing,” I finally muttered.
He laughed again and stretched out on his bed. “You’ll get it. Me, it’s the singing. I don’t think Jake’s human, man.”
I nodded in agreement and sighed. “…You think this is even gonna work?” I said. “I mean. What if we practice and somehow manage to actually get good, but no one wants to hear us.”
RJ’s sheets rustled as he shrugged. He was already drifting off, I could tell by the way his words had gone soft around the edges when he talked. “So we sing for pennies in the park. ‘Snot so bad. Betcha some of those dance songs Jake’s writing would go over real well with the bum crowd.”
I snorted, picturing the five of us huddled around a ball cap, belting out harmonies for sparrows.
“Don’ worry ‘bout it s’much, man,” he mumbled into his pillow. “N’matter what, y’got me.”
“You says I want you?” I said, but I meant it affectionately, and anyway he was already asleep.
***
Jake: It took me a long time to get used to Jake, just because he kept such weird hours. He worked at the club during the night and rehearsed with us in the afternoons and spent most of the rest of the time in his studio writing more songs for us. He rarely wore shoes unless he had to, and I couldn’t figure out if that was a dancer thing or just a Jake thing, and when he wasn’t in his studio he had a tendency to wander the house for no reason, or sit in one place for a really long time, staring at nothing while his fingers twitched a little from time to time.
I was almost positive he was on drugs, and was waiting for the time when I was going to have to save RJ’s scrawny ass from a coked up wack job on a bad trip (again). It took us months to realize that he was actually clean (you know, other than the occasional joint), just weird.
It was RJ who first introduced the idea that he was actually an alien, which is a theory I’ll defend to this day. It just makes too much damn sense, and sooner or later the mother ship is going to get all the messages he’s been trying to send out with his more “experimental” songs and swing back to pick him up, and then we’ll be out a lead tenor.
Sometimes there’s just no use talking to Jake, he lives too much in his own world and he’ll make listening faces and nod along like he gets it and then five minutes later he has no idea what you said. And sometimes he forgets that people out in the real world don’t necessarily know what’s going on in his head, which can make it hard to follow the conversation when he does talk, but at least it’s never boring.
He practiced with me in the garage whenever we both had a spare second, trying desperately to get my dancing up to speed. It was mostly an uphill battle. He and Lewis had both been taking dance classes since they were kids, and RJ and Riley may not have known the formal terminology, but they could both move. I on the other hand, had only ever danced with my sisters in the kitchen, and even then they had to physically force me to play along, and I always broke away before Billy could come in and mock me relentlessly. I didn’t even dance at school social events, which I mostly wasn’t allowed in to and I mostly only went to in order to score with girls anyway.
“You gotta stop worrying about looking stupid, or you’re gonna end up looking stupid,” he said one day. We were sitting on the floor in the garage, where I’d landed on my ass after attempting a turn.
“Is that supposed to make sense?” I said. My hair was drenched with sweat and clinging to my face, and I mostly just wanted to go back into the house and stick my head in the freezer.
He shrugged. “It’s like. Ok, you know the drag shows?” Thanks to my dear sister, who was taking cruel advantage of the fact that I was living in the city now, I did, in fact, know several drag shows, which Jake already knew since he’d joined us for a few, so I just snorted.
“Yeah?” I didn’t even wonder where he could possibly be going with this. By this time I’d known Jake for a few months and I knew better than to try and make him explain his thought process before he got there, he’d only get lost.
“Ok, and you know how some of the ladies are really, like, um.”
“Dogs?”
“Right. But they’re up there anyway, lip-syncing to Cher and flaunting what they got. Or, you know, don’t got.”
“…You’re saying my dancing is like a bad drag show?” I was confused and a little insulted, because I’d kind of thought I was getting at least a little better.
“No. Dude. What?” Jake was confused, too. “I’m saying it should be like a bad drag show.”
“What?”
“Wait. No, that’s not what I’m saying.”
“Good.”
“It should be like a good drag show.”
I stared at him, and he popped back up to his feet like he was made out of springs and instantly started in on some fast turns and fancy footwork that made it look like it was gliding along the floor. “It’s about confidence, man, you gotta sell it. Those ladies get up every night, and it could just be a bunch of dudes in dresses waving their arms around, but since they believe that they’re fierce, they are fierce. You gotta be like that. When you go to do a move, do it, or you’ll just end up on your ass.” Then he neatly tucked his body up into a twisting back flip, landed perfectly, and grinned at me.
“So,” I said, “you’re telling me to dance like a queen?”
“I could go get you a pink feather boa and a diamond tiara, if it’ll help.”
I stared at him for a long time, until the slight twitch at one corner of his mouth revealed that he was trying to make a joke, because it wasn’t really clear from the deadpan way he spoke. Then I rolled my eyes hard and flopped back onto the floor. “Whatever, Sparky.”
He sprinkled water from his water bottle over me, but didn’t seem too concerned that I still didn’t really get what he was trying to say. Jake spoke Korean and English and was only really fluent in music, which not a whole lot of people can really speak at all, so he was pretty used to being misunderstood. Either whoever he was trying to talk to would get it eventually or they wouldn’t.
***
Riley: Riley earned his reputation as Mr. Mom early on. At first it really irritated me, because I didn’t think I was in the market for another big brother, but it’s probably impossible to stay mad at a guy like Riley. He almost never gets angry, as long as you don’t bother him before nine in the morning.
He still lived at home with his dad, his stepmother, Lewis, and their little sister, but he was poking around looking for an apartment, and he picked all three of us up from school most days. During the day and in the evenings he worked as a singing waiter at a kitschy doo-wop diner for tourists, and he tended to stroll into rehearsals with his hair still overly greased, singing some fifties sock hop hit. The group liked to eat there when he was working a Saturday shift, because he always snuck us free fries and he didn’t even mind us heckling him when he had to go do his Fonzie thing.
For the first few weeks of knowing him, I’ll admit that I spent a lot of time trying to push his buttons. I’d already decided that I didn’t like his bratty little stepbrother, and I wanted to know if the older one was going to be as bad. And maybe it was a little alpha male posturing, or instincts left over from juvie or something, but he was the only one who was taller than me, and I guess the thug in me wanted to take on the only guy I saw as a potential “threat.”
Yeah, the trailer rat in me doesn’t make a whole lot of sense sometimes. The only way Riley could be considered a threat was if you were holding the last of the coffee right before an early call. I leaned on him and he just swayed with it. I sneered at him and he just smiled, like he was sure I was telling a joke and he was just waiting for the punch line. Eventually I just gave up on it, and he grinned at me like an idiot and punched my arm, all buddy-buddy, and it was so freaking corny that I just let him, and after that we didn’t have any problems anymore.
He used his skateboard to get most places if he could get away with it, despite the fact that Vegas isn’t really board friendly, being mostly flat, and the places where the sidewalks are wide enough and even enough for it are also the places perpetually clogged with tourists. Still, it made him happy and it reminded him of home, or something, so whatever.
He tried to teach RJ how to board one day, just around the driveway while we were taking a break from rehearsals. It took RJ twenty minutes to work up the courage to stand on the thing, and then he shrieked and tumbled off as soon as he worked up a little unexpected speed.
Riley fell over laughing, then jogged off to catch his board, which had rolled off into the street.
“That isn’t natural!” RJ declared. “It isn’t safe!”
“Dude, it’s just wheels,” Riley said, still chuckling.
“How did you learn?” RJ demanded. “What’s the secret?”
Grinning, Riley displayed road-burn scars on his elbows and knees. “I fell a lot, at first,” he admitted. “But it’s not so bad. And it’s fun, so I didn’t want to quit.” Then he turned to me and used his foot to push the board over to me. “You wanna give it a shot?”
I watched his face warily, but there wasn’t anything in his expression but open, friendly invitation. I rolled my eyes and put an experimental foot on the board.
“Betcha can’t get further than me,” RJ challenged, and I snorted.
“What, two feet? Whatever.”
Jake and Lewis were still in the garage, talking about the music, so I licked my lips and carefully pushed off.
I coasted smoothly down the slanted driveway, picking up speed as I went, before rolling out into the street. It was a stupid thing to feel proud of, but I still beat RJ, so I raised my arms in victory anyway, because beating RJ was the important part.
Then I crashed into the curb on the other side of the street, because I had no idea how to turn or stop, and ended up taking a pretty impressive tumble into the gravel. RJ and Riley were cackling as they ran over to make sure I was ok, but I was laughing too, because it was pretty stupid, and it didn’t feel like they were making fun of me at all.
Riley reclaimed his board and smoothly jumped curbs for our amusement until Jake called us all back inside to work on the next part of the routine.
Riley bumped me with his arm as we walked in, and grinned when I looked at him, and I rolled my eyes and shoved him hard enough to make him stumble into RJ. RJ gave chase for revenge and we laughed all the way back inside.
Riley was the first person to ever offer me an alternative to throwing a punch as a way to deal with the blinding anger and rage that still sometimes over took me, possibly because the only other real option was letting me just flat out murder his stepbrother, and his parents might have gotten a little mad at him if he did that.
It started one afternoon, when Lewis was being a Grade A asshole and I was tense and irritable already from fighting with my mom on the phone (she’d finally realized I wasn’t in Freeland any more and wanted to know what the hell I thought I was doing, which after two years of not living at home anyway I didn’t think was any of her business). Riley knew before either Lewis or even I knew he’d finally crossed the line. I must have snarled something and I hauled off to hit him-really hit him this time, to hurt, the same kind of haze falling over everything that, last time had ended in a destroyed car and a stay in juvie.
Riley came out of nowhere, grabbing me and taking me enough by surprise that he was able to strong arm me outside, where he promptly threw a basketball at me. I caught it mostly on reflex, still vibrating with aborted fury and just stared at him. He smiled at me, but it was a little nervous, a little forced.
“Best to five?” he said.
I snarled and threw the ball back at him, which he apparently chose to interpret as a pass, because he caught it and started dribbling down the drive way to make a shot at the basket hung over the garage door. It swished through and he tossed the ball at me again. “One to nothing,” he said. “Your ball.”
I remember thinking, fine, and, fuckhead. If he wanted to play ball, I’d fucking play ball. And I played as dirty as I knew how, which was plenty, since I’d mostly ever played in gym class, where intimidation and cruelty had been the unstated objective, and with my brothers, where roughhousing was half the fun.
And Riley… just took all of it. Every unnecessary body check, every time I shoved him to the ground to get the ball and sometimes just because. He just got back up and used his freakishly long arms to steal it back and make another basket. And I couldn’t even get close enough to deal out the violence, anyway, because he was too fast, and really a very good player. I’m not sure when but eventually it morphed into an actual game rather than a punishment, and by the time he beat me I wasn’t as angry any more, I was too busy trying to catch my breath.
“I’ll talk to Lewis,” he said. “You shouldn’t hold it against him, he’s just being a brat because he doesn’t like being the youngest.”
I snorted and figured that was pretty much true. That and he was just a brat to begin with.
I thought that was just going to be it, but Riley was there to do the exact same thing the next time it started looking like I was going to lose my temper, and the next and the next, until it got to the point where, whenever I was pissed off I started looking for a Riley and a ball rather than something to hit and destroy.
He explained it to me once, after this had become habit. “See, people think that when you get pissed off you should punch a pillow or scream or something, but really that’s no good, because you’re just teaching yourself to respond to anger-which is a normal, healthy emotion-with a violent action. So, you gotta control that, but you’re body already knows to respond to anger with a rush of adrenaline, so you gotta work that off somehow, and I figure, you know, with basketball the only thing getting thrown around is the ball. And it’ll bounce back.”
He grinned at me, and I groaned at the pun and threw the ball at him.
***
Lewis: Lewis and I did not get along. Pretty much at all. It was the way he looked at me, like he still couldn’t figure out why Jake let me in the group. It was the way he talked to me, quick insults that always made me feel stupid and slow. It was the way his mother, blond and skinny and pretty, sometimes came by to drop him off or pick him up and always hugged him and commented on how good we were all getting. It was a million things and absolutely nothing.
Maybe the thing that pissed me off the most about Lewis was how well he got along with everyone else. He and Riley had had ten years to get used to each other, and they actually seemed to like each other. Riley was no John, but he actually did the big brother thing really well, always looking out for the kid and subtly watching his back and making sure he got enough water when we’d spent the hottest part of the day dancing in a stuffy garage. He and Jake were easily the best singers and the best dancers, and they talked a lot about the songs, or how the choreography should work in this or that section. Despite the four and a half year age difference, Jake never treated Lewis like a kid, which was weird to me because he was so obviously such a brat.
Even RJ had a soft spot for the kid, and he devoted most of our shared lunch periods to making milk shoot out Lewis’s nose. For a little while RJ was Lewis’s new Favorite Person Ever, and when RJ gave him a glow stick pendent necklace that he got from one of the quarter machines Lewis wore it like a prize way after all the glow had died out.
“He’s a cool kid,” RJ assured me once. “He’s just trying to be older than he is, is all. It’s kinda cool, you know, like having a little brother.”
If having Lewis around was what having a little brother was like then I’d never been so grateful to be the youngest in my family, and I was almost tempted to call up Billy and apologize for all the things I’d done to him over the years and gotten away with because John and Annie were both inclined to side with the baby (almost).
Still, he could be charming when he had a mind to be. I might have let him grow on me, come around to the Lewie-lew fan club with all the other guys and been just one big happy, except that sometimes when he pulled his charming act on someone else, sweet talking a waitress for more fries or pulling Mel around to his way of thinking, he’d shoot me this look, like he wanted to make sure I was watching. ‘This is what class looks like,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘This is the difference between you and me. This is why I’ll always be better than you.’ It made my blood boil every damn time.
Other than lunch every day I didn’t have much contact with him at school. Mel was adamant that RJ and I went every day, which chaffed after pretty much only going when we felt like it (or when the cops caught us and dragged us in front of a truancy board), and we were both struggling through our classes, trying to make sure we would graduate by the end of the year, which didn’t leave a whole lot of time for making buddies with a freshman, even if I had been so inclined.
Once, though, there was some sort of pep rally in the gymnasium and everyone had to go, which I didn’t mind since it got me out of biology. So I was edging through the crowd, trying to find RJ so we could sit together, but it was pretty much impossible with so many people and RJ being so small, so I was mostly weighing my odds of ducking out and just ditching for the rest of the day, when I caught sight of Lewis.
He was surrounded by friends, most of them freshman girls, like he was holding court, and they were all giggling over something he’d said. Normally I would have just walked away and left him to it, but then he glanced my way and our eyes locked, and then I felt like I had to go over and say hello or something. The manners Riley was trying to teach me could be confusing sometimes. And anyway, maybe he’d seen RJ.
“’Sup, Lewis,” I said, giving his name that extra punch that I knew he hated because it made it sound like an insult. I let my eyes slide over the girls because, well, girls, and I guess some of them were kind of pretty, even if they were pretty much all freshmen and I wasn’t really all that interested in the giggly young virgin type. A few of them blushed and giggled, too, which has always been gratifying, even then. “These your hags?”
More scandalized, uncertain giggling, like they weren’t sure if they were supposed to be insulted or turned on (a confusion that has messed up more than one young girl in this world), except for one particularly four-eyed girl with her bangs cut in a severely straight line just above her thick glasses. “That’s a really offensive term, you know,” she snapped.
“You don’t say,” I said, raising my eyebrow. I looked at Lewis, but he didn’t say anything. His mouth was a tight white line in his face, and that was the first time I really thought that Little Lewie might actually be more curved than straight.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, so I put it out of my mind. I mean, Janie’s best friend since moving to Vegas was a large gay man named Peter, who gushed over my hair and tried to give me fashion advice every time he saw me, and I liked him alright. But on the other hand, back in Freeland I’d once run in to Billy and a bunch of his friends beating the shit out of a kid everyone in town pretty much figured was Like That, and it hadn’t occurred to me at the time that maybe I should do something about it. So, if my older siblings were my standard in how to act for all situations, I was already a little torn.
Later, Lewis cornered me with narrowed eyes, like he was trying to look intimidating, but he was still really scrawny at this point, so I wasn’t exactly impressed. “Are you going to say anything?” he demanded.
“About what?” I said. Because, yeah, can’t tell anyone about stuff I’m not thinking about.
“Just don’t, alright? It’s no one else’s business but mine.”
I rolled my eyes. “Whatever.” It was a little weird to me that he wasn’t “out” or whatever to Riley at least, but I also wasn’t too interested in spreading it around anyway. Once I’d pushed it out of my mind, giving in to his request was easy enough, but he still watched me suspiciously and then uncertainly for weeks after that.
A few months into knowing him, I took it upon myself to teach Lewis how to fight. Because, this kid? Definitely going to have guys wanting to punch his face in for the rest of his life, and since he can’t possibly talk his way out of every situation (that was just statistics, or possibly probability, but I’d mostly slept through that class), he’d better know how to defend himself.
Of course, my method of teaching probably wouldn’t get approved by any board of education, and I’m not sure if he really realized that was what I was trying to do. I think maybe he thought I was just beating him up for the hell of it. But that was how my brothers had taught me, and I guess I was giving this big brother thing a try.
And, ok, I’ll admit now that I was generally inclined to take our clashes to the physical, because I at least knew that I could kick his ass in a fist fight. I mean, of course I could, he was kind of a scrawny kid, wouldn’t hit the growth spurt that made him taller than me for another few years, and he’s always been skinny like a sapling, while I’d always been big for my age, and broad. I couldn’t keep up with him or defend myself against his verbal barbs, but it was my experience that a swift fist to the face ended the talking portion of every argument, even if it never solved anything.
At first he was hopeless, it wasn’t even a challenge, and I almost felt bad about it. He’d obviously never been in a fight before, and I guess Riley was enough older than him that, in a regular household roughhousing between them would have been discouraged. The first time we fought I didn’t even hit him, I just picked him up by the shirt and shook him a little, like a puppy or something, and he screamed and shrieked like I was killing him until I dropped him.
“What are you gonna do about it?” I asked, which is the same thing John asked me after the first time I went crying to him because Billy hit me. The next time I went to grab him he started screaming a lot earlier, which was an annoying and pansy way of dealing with a problem, but it did get Riley on my ass a lot sooner, and Riley was still pretty protective of Lewis, even if he and I didn’t really have any problems on our own.
“Riley isn’t always gonna be able to watch your ass,” I said, which in retrospect maybe sounded a lot like a threat, but really I was just trying to point out something that should have been obvious.
I never actually punched him, because a kid like him just couldn’t take a hit, you could tell just by looking at him and how his pale skin would flower into bruises whenever he bumped into things during rehearsal, and anyway I wasn’t actually trying to hurt him or torture him or whatever, I just wanted him to know this stuff, because someday he might need it against someone who was trying to hurt him. Sometimes I’d fake him out, though, because he really needed to know how to avoid getting hit, if he couldn’t take a beating. So I’d say, “Hey, think fast,” and toss a fist his way, never really intending to make contact, which is another game Billy and John both used to play on me.
He first time he shrieked and flailed all over the place trying to get away, which was actually pretty funny at the time, since he was normally so graceful and composed, and he tried to demand my immediate expulsion from the group since I’d tried to kill him.
“When I try to kill you, you’ll know it,” I promised him, and he turned pink with rage, and Riley lectured me a little about leaving his stepbrother alone, and Jake told me to knock it off, and I just rolled his eyes.
The next time I tossed him a punch, he still flailed like an idiot to get away, but this time he retaliated and slammed his own fist onto my chest, screaming something that might have been a really wimpy battle cry. He hit me with the ball of his hand instead of his knuckles, and it was kind of pathetic, but it was something.
“Tuck your thumb under and keep your wrist straight,” I said, putting a punch with zero force behind it against his chest to demonstrate.
He just stared at me for, like, five minutes without saying anything. Then he said, “You are absolutely fucking psychotic.” I just shrugged. The next time he tried to punch me-it was still a really fucking weak punch, but he kept his wrist straight, and he didn’t flail quite so much the next time he ducked away from my fist.
It was a while still before I’d really call him my friend, but from that point on it was easier for us to deal with each other without killing each other.
Bonus Confession: I sold something in my etsy shop! It's my first sale to a stranger and they're in Australia! I'm just so excited about it, so this might be the third time you hear about it, but it's just so exciting!
The problem is I only know one route and yesterday it was blocked off for construction or some nonsense. I figured it wouldn't be too hard since I know the intersection it's on, but yeah, I managed to take the wrong turn not once, not just twice, but three times.
So yeah. I got lost in a three block area that I go to almost every day. If we're ever in a situation where we have to depend on my sense of direction, we're doomed.
Today's installment comes from Chapter 4, which I am now realizing is kind of long (almost 7,000 words). Maybe I'll do half today, half tomorrow. Or all of it at once, who knows.
Chapter Four
The Portion of the Book Where I Rag Mercilessly on the Other Guys, or: Shooting Synchronized Fish in a Bedazzled Barrel (Meet the Guys)
Mel was not down with the idea that I would be dropping out (“If we have to a delinquent he can’t be a dropout, too.”), and eventually it was decided that RJ and I would move into the city and stay with Jake in his grandmother’s house and enroll in the Las Vegas school district for our senior year so that the group could rehearse.
Mr. Stein was a little less than enthused, given the general reputation of Las Vegas schools, but he relented. RJ had been taking care of himself for way too long to start taking orders from his dad now, and they both probably knew it.So, Riley drove his Jeep Cherokee up to Freeland one weekend and we went around to RJ’s, Annie’s and John’s houses to collect all our stuff.
John awkwardly clapped me on the back, but Annie hugged me long and hard. “Take care of yourself, and take care of RJ,” she said.
“Duh,” I said, and she laughed. “You don’t have to worry, you know. Janie’s gonna be around, and Billy’s been talking about moving there soon, too.”
She smiled a little funny and said, “Jesse-baby, I will always worry about you. You sure this is something you wanna do?”
I shrugged evasively. “I don’t wanna stay in Freeland.” And I wanted to sing. Jake had me believing that I really could, but it seemed corny to say.
Living with Jake wasn’t so bad. After an awkward adjustment period when he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be in charge of us or not, he decided he wasn’t and spent most of his time when we weren’t rehearsing in the spare bedroom he’d converted to a studio. He always seemed to have money despite only working nights and weekends DJ-ing at a club downtown (he confessed to us once that the same loaded grandmother who left him the house had also left him a substantial amount of cash, which he was mostly living on at the moment), and he didn’t care what we did so long as it didn’t effect rehearsals.
We figured out pretty quick that Jake couldn’t cook at all and had, in fact, been subsisting on take out, so RJ took over in the kitchen and thus became Jake’s Favorite Person Ever (I’ve never seen someone so grateful for a grilled cheese sandwich). He kept us well stocked on pasta and meat loaf and seemed genuinely happy to do it.
School wasn’t so bad, either, surprisingly enough. It was still school, and I still felt pretty stupid a lot of the time as I struggled to catch up from eleven years of not caring and no one caring about me, but no one knew me and it was easier to stay out of trouble then I’d thought it would be. RJ made a lot of friends and I mostly just tagged along with him. The only annoying part was that Lewis, who was a freshman at the same school, insisted on eating lunch with us every day. He and RJ were hitting it right off, which irritated me a little, mostly because I still found the little prick annoying.
The worst part was when Jake made us quit smoking. Both RJ and me had been stealing cigarettes pretty regularly from wherever we could get them for years-he got them from his dad and from the gas station, I got them from all of my older siblings. Billy and Jane had even been known to bribe us with cigarettes if there was something they wanted. To us it wasn’t a big deal.
Jake wasn’t having it. “You’re vocalists, now,” he said, “you can’t be doing anything that might damage your voices.” And for once he was dead serious and completely focused-we couldn’t distract him or divert him. “No more cigarettes or you’re out of the group.”
It was irritatingly much easier for RJ than it was for me. He passed over his last pack without a complaint and, other than a bit of jitteriness and a marked increase in coffee intake (which was frankly frightening, since he was bad enough without the caffeine), didn’t even seem to miss it. (I didn’t find out until years later, in the middle of some interview, that he’d been sneaking cigarettes on the side for years. The little traitor, I could have killed him, that whole time I thought we were in it together.)
Me, I was in hell. I hadn’t considered myself an addict until I had to quit, and it didn’t help that they made me give up chewing tobacco at the same time (I’d picked the habit up from John and my old quest to be as much like him as possible. I tried to argue that dip couldn’t affect my voice at all, but all four of them-even RJ who I’d thought would be on my side-came right back with “yellow teeth” and “disgusting habit” and “mouth cancer” and I pretty much lost.)
I chewed my lips raw and bloody and snarled at anyone and anything that came within five feet of me. I itched. I couldn’t sleep. I found myself just sticking stuff in my mouth like some kind of retarded toddler, pencils, toothpicks, soft drink straws from Riley’s diner, just to have something to suck on and chew on. In class one day I chewed my pen so hard the ink capsule busted and I spent the rest of the day with a bright blue mouth and got in my first fight since leaving Freeland with some nameless kid who thought it was funny.
The patches just made me more irritable and the guys were all tiptoeing around me. Finally, Riley, who’d been campaigning to get his mom to quit for years, went out and got me that Nicorette gum stuff. Worked like a charm. I used to go through a few packs of the stuff a day until Riley found out while we were touring in Europe-apparently I was supposed to have weaned myself off it or something-and made me switch to Dentine.
We rehearsed after school every day, in the garage of Jake’s house, which he’d partially converted to a studio. The air conditioning in there was spotty at best, and we sweated through our clothes while Jake taught us the songs and the choreography he wanted us to know.
It was a weird world to live in, and strangely isolating. Already there was no one else who knew, just me and these four other guys, dancing in a garage in the middle of Las Vegas.
***
RJ: RJ and I shared a bedroom, and it was pretty much like the sleepovers we used to have when we were little kids, only we were both in beds instead of moth eaten Transformers sleeping bags, and we made fewer sheet forts. At first I was honestly a little worried about the guy-wandering the streets in the middle of the night because he couldn’t sleep was a much worse idea in the city than it had been in Freeland, and it had never exactly been a sign of brilliance-but RJ has always been way tougher than most people tend to think, including me. He adapts and he survives, no matter what.
Still, I really don’t know what I was worried about. Las Vegas is a weird fucking town and RJ is a weird fucking kid. In Freeland he drew stares, but in the city of neon he was just another brightly dressed kid. He bopped along to music playing in his head, because he couldn’t afford an iPod, and he still stole packs of glow sticks and wore them around his wrists like bracelets, even though he’d stopped going to the parties.
He came home one day with a lifetime supply of tootsie pops (which the five of us tore through in a matter of days) and his hair dyed bright green, still gelled up in thin, stiff spikes all over.
I took one look at him and spat the milk I’d been drinking all over the kitchen, I was laughing so hard.
“Mel’s gonna yell about image again,” Lewis predicted with a sigh, but even he had to agree that it was pretty cool.
“Whatever,” RJ shrugged, grinning. “It isn’t permanent.” And it did wash out pretty quickly, though he ended up looking like moss was growing on his head for a few weeks afterward. No one but RJ would be able to pull it off.
Shortly after we moved in he went on a pranking spree, duct-taping doors closed and putting a barrier of cellophane between the fridge door and the food and smearing toothpaste on the toilet seat. He got me plenty of times, because I’ve always been a really easy target for that kind of thing, and every single time I’d shout at him loud enough to shake the house and draw Jake out of his studio-room with a scowl on his face for messing up his recording, while RJ giggled like an idiot and took off to hide. Most often though the target was Jake, who was satisfying in his own way, because every single time he tried to put sugar in his coffee and ended up with salt instead he’d just sit there, frowning a little like he was completely and utterly confused.
“Is he trying to kill me off to get more solos or something?” Jake asked me one day, in that perfectly dead pan way of his that made me unsure whether he was joking or being sarcastic or not.
I finished my icy pop and shrugged. “Probably not. More like he’s, like, testing you out, you know?”
Jake didn’t know and I struggled to explain.
“It’s like, you’re new, right?”
Jake frowned. “It’s my house. You guys are the new ones.”
“No, I mean, like, new to RJ. You’re a new person. In his world.”
“Ok?”
“Ok, so he’s trying to figure out how you react to stuff, and if you’re gonna go off on him, and how much he can get away with and stuff.”
“And stuff.”
“He’s just getting used to things, he’ll calm down soon.”
And he did. One day RJ went to Jake’s studio with a grilled cheese and tomato soup offering and spent the next two hours just hanging out and offering suggestions and singing on cue , but mostly just watching, as silent and still as RJ is capable of being, as Jake worked and gradually forgot he was there at all.
After that, RJ and Jake were a little inseparable, in a strange way. RJ would chatter at Jake while Jake sat on a stool in the kitchen, nursing an extra-large cup of coffee and trying to wake up, and RJ would leave offerings of cheap toys from quarter machines at the grocery store in Jake’s studio from time to time.
“What’s he doing now?” Jake asked me eventually, and I rolled his eyes.
“Dude, just don’t worry about it. He’s decided he likes you is all.”
“Your friend is weird.” Coming from Jake this was a little rich, but I couldn’t exactly refute it, so I just shrugged. Jake seemed to actually like the attention anyway, and the toys took up permanent position lining the edge of his keyboard.
One night, after rehearsal and after dinner and after Jake had left for his DJ-ing gig, RJ and I sat up in our room, him on his bed and me on mine. It had been a particularly intense rehearsal, and everyone was frustrated by my continued difficulties with the dancing, especially me. I never thought I would miss Freeland, but at least there I could hurl rocks at shit when I was pissed off without getting the cops called on me (most nights).
“You ever really think we’d end up here, like this?” he asked suddenly, and I remembered a long ago talk on a broken merry-go-round with Janie, her drunk asshole friends defacing the already defaced equipment around us.
“…The boy band is kind of a surprise,” I said after a moment, and he laughed. RJ has always had a laugh like a hyena who got ahold of a machine gun. It’s a little infectious.
“What do you think? You know, like, so far?”
I picked at the threadbare quilt John’s girlfriend Lisa had given to me for the move. It surprised me that she honestly seemed a little sad and worried to see me go. I’d always thought she hated putting up with me three or four nights a week and only did it for John. But maybe she was just going to miss the free childcare.
“I’m never gonna get this fucking dancing,” I finally muttered.
He laughed again and stretched out on his bed. “You’ll get it. Me, it’s the singing. I don’t think Jake’s human, man.”
I nodded in agreement and sighed. “…You think this is even gonna work?” I said. “I mean. What if we practice and somehow manage to actually get good, but no one wants to hear us.”
RJ’s sheets rustled as he shrugged. He was already drifting off, I could tell by the way his words had gone soft around the edges when he talked. “So we sing for pennies in the park. ‘Snot so bad. Betcha some of those dance songs Jake’s writing would go over real well with the bum crowd.”
I snorted, picturing the five of us huddled around a ball cap, belting out harmonies for sparrows.
“Don’ worry ‘bout it s’much, man,” he mumbled into his pillow. “N’matter what, y’got me.”
“You says I want you?” I said, but I meant it affectionately, and anyway he was already asleep.
***
Jake: It took me a long time to get used to Jake, just because he kept such weird hours. He worked at the club during the night and rehearsed with us in the afternoons and spent most of the rest of the time in his studio writing more songs for us. He rarely wore shoes unless he had to, and I couldn’t figure out if that was a dancer thing or just a Jake thing, and when he wasn’t in his studio he had a tendency to wander the house for no reason, or sit in one place for a really long time, staring at nothing while his fingers twitched a little from time to time.
I was almost positive he was on drugs, and was waiting for the time when I was going to have to save RJ’s scrawny ass from a coked up wack job on a bad trip (again). It took us months to realize that he was actually clean (you know, other than the occasional joint), just weird.
It was RJ who first introduced the idea that he was actually an alien, which is a theory I’ll defend to this day. It just makes too much damn sense, and sooner or later the mother ship is going to get all the messages he’s been trying to send out with his more “experimental” songs and swing back to pick him up, and then we’ll be out a lead tenor.
Sometimes there’s just no use talking to Jake, he lives too much in his own world and he’ll make listening faces and nod along like he gets it and then five minutes later he has no idea what you said. And sometimes he forgets that people out in the real world don’t necessarily know what’s going on in his head, which can make it hard to follow the conversation when he does talk, but at least it’s never boring.
He practiced with me in the garage whenever we both had a spare second, trying desperately to get my dancing up to speed. It was mostly an uphill battle. He and Lewis had both been taking dance classes since they were kids, and RJ and Riley may not have known the formal terminology, but they could both move. I on the other hand, had only ever danced with my sisters in the kitchen, and even then they had to physically force me to play along, and I always broke away before Billy could come in and mock me relentlessly. I didn’t even dance at school social events, which I mostly wasn’t allowed in to and I mostly only went to in order to score with girls anyway.
“You gotta stop worrying about looking stupid, or you’re gonna end up looking stupid,” he said one day. We were sitting on the floor in the garage, where I’d landed on my ass after attempting a turn.
“Is that supposed to make sense?” I said. My hair was drenched with sweat and clinging to my face, and I mostly just wanted to go back into the house and stick my head in the freezer.
He shrugged. “It’s like. Ok, you know the drag shows?” Thanks to my dear sister, who was taking cruel advantage of the fact that I was living in the city now, I did, in fact, know several drag shows, which Jake already knew since he’d joined us for a few, so I just snorted.
“Yeah?” I didn’t even wonder where he could possibly be going with this. By this time I’d known Jake for a few months and I knew better than to try and make him explain his thought process before he got there, he’d only get lost.
“Ok, and you know how some of the ladies are really, like, um.”
“Dogs?”
“Right. But they’re up there anyway, lip-syncing to Cher and flaunting what they got. Or, you know, don’t got.”
“…You’re saying my dancing is like a bad drag show?” I was confused and a little insulted, because I’d kind of thought I was getting at least a little better.
“No. Dude. What?” Jake was confused, too. “I’m saying it should be like a bad drag show.”
“What?”
“Wait. No, that’s not what I’m saying.”
“Good.”
“It should be like a good drag show.”
I stared at him, and he popped back up to his feet like he was made out of springs and instantly started in on some fast turns and fancy footwork that made it look like it was gliding along the floor. “It’s about confidence, man, you gotta sell it. Those ladies get up every night, and it could just be a bunch of dudes in dresses waving their arms around, but since they believe that they’re fierce, they are fierce. You gotta be like that. When you go to do a move, do it, or you’ll just end up on your ass.” Then he neatly tucked his body up into a twisting back flip, landed perfectly, and grinned at me.
“So,” I said, “you’re telling me to dance like a queen?”
“I could go get you a pink feather boa and a diamond tiara, if it’ll help.”
I stared at him for a long time, until the slight twitch at one corner of his mouth revealed that he was trying to make a joke, because it wasn’t really clear from the deadpan way he spoke. Then I rolled my eyes hard and flopped back onto the floor. “Whatever, Sparky.”
He sprinkled water from his water bottle over me, but didn’t seem too concerned that I still didn’t really get what he was trying to say. Jake spoke Korean and English and was only really fluent in music, which not a whole lot of people can really speak at all, so he was pretty used to being misunderstood. Either whoever he was trying to talk to would get it eventually or they wouldn’t.
***
Riley: Riley earned his reputation as Mr. Mom early on. At first it really irritated me, because I didn’t think I was in the market for another big brother, but it’s probably impossible to stay mad at a guy like Riley. He almost never gets angry, as long as you don’t bother him before nine in the morning.
He still lived at home with his dad, his stepmother, Lewis, and their little sister, but he was poking around looking for an apartment, and he picked all three of us up from school most days. During the day and in the evenings he worked as a singing waiter at a kitschy doo-wop diner for tourists, and he tended to stroll into rehearsals with his hair still overly greased, singing some fifties sock hop hit. The group liked to eat there when he was working a Saturday shift, because he always snuck us free fries and he didn’t even mind us heckling him when he had to go do his Fonzie thing.
For the first few weeks of knowing him, I’ll admit that I spent a lot of time trying to push his buttons. I’d already decided that I didn’t like his bratty little stepbrother, and I wanted to know if the older one was going to be as bad. And maybe it was a little alpha male posturing, or instincts left over from juvie or something, but he was the only one who was taller than me, and I guess the thug in me wanted to take on the only guy I saw as a potential “threat.”
Yeah, the trailer rat in me doesn’t make a whole lot of sense sometimes. The only way Riley could be considered a threat was if you were holding the last of the coffee right before an early call. I leaned on him and he just swayed with it. I sneered at him and he just smiled, like he was sure I was telling a joke and he was just waiting for the punch line. Eventually I just gave up on it, and he grinned at me like an idiot and punched my arm, all buddy-buddy, and it was so freaking corny that I just let him, and after that we didn’t have any problems anymore.
He used his skateboard to get most places if he could get away with it, despite the fact that Vegas isn’t really board friendly, being mostly flat, and the places where the sidewalks are wide enough and even enough for it are also the places perpetually clogged with tourists. Still, it made him happy and it reminded him of home, or something, so whatever.
He tried to teach RJ how to board one day, just around the driveway while we were taking a break from rehearsals. It took RJ twenty minutes to work up the courage to stand on the thing, and then he shrieked and tumbled off as soon as he worked up a little unexpected speed.
Riley fell over laughing, then jogged off to catch his board, which had rolled off into the street.
“That isn’t natural!” RJ declared. “It isn’t safe!”
“Dude, it’s just wheels,” Riley said, still chuckling.
“How did you learn?” RJ demanded. “What’s the secret?”
Grinning, Riley displayed road-burn scars on his elbows and knees. “I fell a lot, at first,” he admitted. “But it’s not so bad. And it’s fun, so I didn’t want to quit.” Then he turned to me and used his foot to push the board over to me. “You wanna give it a shot?”
I watched his face warily, but there wasn’t anything in his expression but open, friendly invitation. I rolled my eyes and put an experimental foot on the board.
“Betcha can’t get further than me,” RJ challenged, and I snorted.
“What, two feet? Whatever.”
Jake and Lewis were still in the garage, talking about the music, so I licked my lips and carefully pushed off.
I coasted smoothly down the slanted driveway, picking up speed as I went, before rolling out into the street. It was a stupid thing to feel proud of, but I still beat RJ, so I raised my arms in victory anyway, because beating RJ was the important part.
Then I crashed into the curb on the other side of the street, because I had no idea how to turn or stop, and ended up taking a pretty impressive tumble into the gravel. RJ and Riley were cackling as they ran over to make sure I was ok, but I was laughing too, because it was pretty stupid, and it didn’t feel like they were making fun of me at all.
Riley reclaimed his board and smoothly jumped curbs for our amusement until Jake called us all back inside to work on the next part of the routine.
Riley bumped me with his arm as we walked in, and grinned when I looked at him, and I rolled my eyes and shoved him hard enough to make him stumble into RJ. RJ gave chase for revenge and we laughed all the way back inside.
Riley was the first person to ever offer me an alternative to throwing a punch as a way to deal with the blinding anger and rage that still sometimes over took me, possibly because the only other real option was letting me just flat out murder his stepbrother, and his parents might have gotten a little mad at him if he did that.
It started one afternoon, when Lewis was being a Grade A asshole and I was tense and irritable already from fighting with my mom on the phone (she’d finally realized I wasn’t in Freeland any more and wanted to know what the hell I thought I was doing, which after two years of not living at home anyway I didn’t think was any of her business). Riley knew before either Lewis or even I knew he’d finally crossed the line. I must have snarled something and I hauled off to hit him-really hit him this time, to hurt, the same kind of haze falling over everything that, last time had ended in a destroyed car and a stay in juvie.
Riley came out of nowhere, grabbing me and taking me enough by surprise that he was able to strong arm me outside, where he promptly threw a basketball at me. I caught it mostly on reflex, still vibrating with aborted fury and just stared at him. He smiled at me, but it was a little nervous, a little forced.
“Best to five?” he said.
I snarled and threw the ball back at him, which he apparently chose to interpret as a pass, because he caught it and started dribbling down the drive way to make a shot at the basket hung over the garage door. It swished through and he tossed the ball at me again. “One to nothing,” he said. “Your ball.”
I remember thinking, fine, and, fuckhead. If he wanted to play ball, I’d fucking play ball. And I played as dirty as I knew how, which was plenty, since I’d mostly ever played in gym class, where intimidation and cruelty had been the unstated objective, and with my brothers, where roughhousing was half the fun.
And Riley… just took all of it. Every unnecessary body check, every time I shoved him to the ground to get the ball and sometimes just because. He just got back up and used his freakishly long arms to steal it back and make another basket. And I couldn’t even get close enough to deal out the violence, anyway, because he was too fast, and really a very good player. I’m not sure when but eventually it morphed into an actual game rather than a punishment, and by the time he beat me I wasn’t as angry any more, I was too busy trying to catch my breath.
“I’ll talk to Lewis,” he said. “You shouldn’t hold it against him, he’s just being a brat because he doesn’t like being the youngest.”
I snorted and figured that was pretty much true. That and he was just a brat to begin with.
I thought that was just going to be it, but Riley was there to do the exact same thing the next time it started looking like I was going to lose my temper, and the next and the next, until it got to the point where, whenever I was pissed off I started looking for a Riley and a ball rather than something to hit and destroy.
He explained it to me once, after this had become habit. “See, people think that when you get pissed off you should punch a pillow or scream or something, but really that’s no good, because you’re just teaching yourself to respond to anger-which is a normal, healthy emotion-with a violent action. So, you gotta control that, but you’re body already knows to respond to anger with a rush of adrenaline, so you gotta work that off somehow, and I figure, you know, with basketball the only thing getting thrown around is the ball. And it’ll bounce back.”
He grinned at me, and I groaned at the pun and threw the ball at him.
***
Lewis: Lewis and I did not get along. Pretty much at all. It was the way he looked at me, like he still couldn’t figure out why Jake let me in the group. It was the way he talked to me, quick insults that always made me feel stupid and slow. It was the way his mother, blond and skinny and pretty, sometimes came by to drop him off or pick him up and always hugged him and commented on how good we were all getting. It was a million things and absolutely nothing.
Maybe the thing that pissed me off the most about Lewis was how well he got along with everyone else. He and Riley had had ten years to get used to each other, and they actually seemed to like each other. Riley was no John, but he actually did the big brother thing really well, always looking out for the kid and subtly watching his back and making sure he got enough water when we’d spent the hottest part of the day dancing in a stuffy garage. He and Jake were easily the best singers and the best dancers, and they talked a lot about the songs, or how the choreography should work in this or that section. Despite the four and a half year age difference, Jake never treated Lewis like a kid, which was weird to me because he was so obviously such a brat.
Even RJ had a soft spot for the kid, and he devoted most of our shared lunch periods to making milk shoot out Lewis’s nose. For a little while RJ was Lewis’s new Favorite Person Ever, and when RJ gave him a glow stick pendent necklace that he got from one of the quarter machines Lewis wore it like a prize way after all the glow had died out.
“He’s a cool kid,” RJ assured me once. “He’s just trying to be older than he is, is all. It’s kinda cool, you know, like having a little brother.”
If having Lewis around was what having a little brother was like then I’d never been so grateful to be the youngest in my family, and I was almost tempted to call up Billy and apologize for all the things I’d done to him over the years and gotten away with because John and Annie were both inclined to side with the baby (almost).
Still, he could be charming when he had a mind to be. I might have let him grow on me, come around to the Lewie-lew fan club with all the other guys and been just one big happy, except that sometimes when he pulled his charming act on someone else, sweet talking a waitress for more fries or pulling Mel around to his way of thinking, he’d shoot me this look, like he wanted to make sure I was watching. ‘This is what class looks like,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘This is the difference between you and me. This is why I’ll always be better than you.’ It made my blood boil every damn time.
Other than lunch every day I didn’t have much contact with him at school. Mel was adamant that RJ and I went every day, which chaffed after pretty much only going when we felt like it (or when the cops caught us and dragged us in front of a truancy board), and we were both struggling through our classes, trying to make sure we would graduate by the end of the year, which didn’t leave a whole lot of time for making buddies with a freshman, even if I had been so inclined.
Once, though, there was some sort of pep rally in the gymnasium and everyone had to go, which I didn’t mind since it got me out of biology. So I was edging through the crowd, trying to find RJ so we could sit together, but it was pretty much impossible with so many people and RJ being so small, so I was mostly weighing my odds of ducking out and just ditching for the rest of the day, when I caught sight of Lewis.
He was surrounded by friends, most of them freshman girls, like he was holding court, and they were all giggling over something he’d said. Normally I would have just walked away and left him to it, but then he glanced my way and our eyes locked, and then I felt like I had to go over and say hello or something. The manners Riley was trying to teach me could be confusing sometimes. And anyway, maybe he’d seen RJ.
“’Sup, Lewis,” I said, giving his name that extra punch that I knew he hated because it made it sound like an insult. I let my eyes slide over the girls because, well, girls, and I guess some of them were kind of pretty, even if they were pretty much all freshmen and I wasn’t really all that interested in the giggly young virgin type. A few of them blushed and giggled, too, which has always been gratifying, even then. “These your hags?”
More scandalized, uncertain giggling, like they weren’t sure if they were supposed to be insulted or turned on (a confusion that has messed up more than one young girl in this world), except for one particularly four-eyed girl with her bangs cut in a severely straight line just above her thick glasses. “That’s a really offensive term, you know,” she snapped.
“You don’t say,” I said, raising my eyebrow. I looked at Lewis, but he didn’t say anything. His mouth was a tight white line in his face, and that was the first time I really thought that Little Lewie might actually be more curved than straight.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, so I put it out of my mind. I mean, Janie’s best friend since moving to Vegas was a large gay man named Peter, who gushed over my hair and tried to give me fashion advice every time he saw me, and I liked him alright. But on the other hand, back in Freeland I’d once run in to Billy and a bunch of his friends beating the shit out of a kid everyone in town pretty much figured was Like That, and it hadn’t occurred to me at the time that maybe I should do something about it. So, if my older siblings were my standard in how to act for all situations, I was already a little torn.
Later, Lewis cornered me with narrowed eyes, like he was trying to look intimidating, but he was still really scrawny at this point, so I wasn’t exactly impressed. “Are you going to say anything?” he demanded.
“About what?” I said. Because, yeah, can’t tell anyone about stuff I’m not thinking about.
“Just don’t, alright? It’s no one else’s business but mine.”
I rolled my eyes. “Whatever.” It was a little weird to me that he wasn’t “out” or whatever to Riley at least, but I also wasn’t too interested in spreading it around anyway. Once I’d pushed it out of my mind, giving in to his request was easy enough, but he still watched me suspiciously and then uncertainly for weeks after that.
A few months into knowing him, I took it upon myself to teach Lewis how to fight. Because, this kid? Definitely going to have guys wanting to punch his face in for the rest of his life, and since he can’t possibly talk his way out of every situation (that was just statistics, or possibly probability, but I’d mostly slept through that class), he’d better know how to defend himself.
Of course, my method of teaching probably wouldn’t get approved by any board of education, and I’m not sure if he really realized that was what I was trying to do. I think maybe he thought I was just beating him up for the hell of it. But that was how my brothers had taught me, and I guess I was giving this big brother thing a try.
And, ok, I’ll admit now that I was generally inclined to take our clashes to the physical, because I at least knew that I could kick his ass in a fist fight. I mean, of course I could, he was kind of a scrawny kid, wouldn’t hit the growth spurt that made him taller than me for another few years, and he’s always been skinny like a sapling, while I’d always been big for my age, and broad. I couldn’t keep up with him or defend myself against his verbal barbs, but it was my experience that a swift fist to the face ended the talking portion of every argument, even if it never solved anything.
At first he was hopeless, it wasn’t even a challenge, and I almost felt bad about it. He’d obviously never been in a fight before, and I guess Riley was enough older than him that, in a regular household roughhousing between them would have been discouraged. The first time we fought I didn’t even hit him, I just picked him up by the shirt and shook him a little, like a puppy or something, and he screamed and shrieked like I was killing him until I dropped him.
“What are you gonna do about it?” I asked, which is the same thing John asked me after the first time I went crying to him because Billy hit me. The next time I went to grab him he started screaming a lot earlier, which was an annoying and pansy way of dealing with a problem, but it did get Riley on my ass a lot sooner, and Riley was still pretty protective of Lewis, even if he and I didn’t really have any problems on our own.
“Riley isn’t always gonna be able to watch your ass,” I said, which in retrospect maybe sounded a lot like a threat, but really I was just trying to point out something that should have been obvious.
I never actually punched him, because a kid like him just couldn’t take a hit, you could tell just by looking at him and how his pale skin would flower into bruises whenever he bumped into things during rehearsal, and anyway I wasn’t actually trying to hurt him or torture him or whatever, I just wanted him to know this stuff, because someday he might need it against someone who was trying to hurt him. Sometimes I’d fake him out, though, because he really needed to know how to avoid getting hit, if he couldn’t take a beating. So I’d say, “Hey, think fast,” and toss a fist his way, never really intending to make contact, which is another game Billy and John both used to play on me.
He first time he shrieked and flailed all over the place trying to get away, which was actually pretty funny at the time, since he was normally so graceful and composed, and he tried to demand my immediate expulsion from the group since I’d tried to kill him.
“When I try to kill you, you’ll know it,” I promised him, and he turned pink with rage, and Riley lectured me a little about leaving his stepbrother alone, and Jake told me to knock it off, and I just rolled his eyes.
The next time I tossed him a punch, he still flailed like an idiot to get away, but this time he retaliated and slammed his own fist onto my chest, screaming something that might have been a really wimpy battle cry. He hit me with the ball of his hand instead of his knuckles, and it was kind of pathetic, but it was something.
“Tuck your thumb under and keep your wrist straight,” I said, putting a punch with zero force behind it against his chest to demonstrate.
He just stared at me for, like, five minutes without saying anything. Then he said, “You are absolutely fucking psychotic.” I just shrugged. The next time he tried to punch me-it was still a really fucking weak punch, but he kept his wrist straight, and he didn’t flail quite so much the next time he ducked away from my fist.
It was a while still before I’d really call him my friend, but from that point on it was easier for us to deal with each other without killing each other.
Bonus Confession: I sold something in my etsy shop! It's my first sale to a stranger and they're in Australia! I'm just so excited about it, so this might be the third time you hear about it, but it's just so exciting!