Fast Fiction 04.29.05
F
539 words by Stanley Lieber
I must have been twelve. He, fourteen. He swore he'd changed.
The holes in the knees of my trousers and the grass stains were from skidding across the causeway during a fist fight at lunch. I'd sit through Media Psychology thinking the instructor was disappointed in me. I untucked my shirt and didn't care. Girls in the classroom wouldn't look at me, or anyway sneered whenever they mustered the energy to bother. I had taken to burning small blemishes into the cuffs of my jacket with the ends of his lit cigarettes. This, I thought, added character to my appearance. He would laugh at my ideas and ridicule my affectations without pity.
I'd sometimes force myself to doodle in my sketchbook, practicing -- for what I wouldn't have been able to say. I'd compose meticulous, staged entries in my journal, straining for words that weren't articles or nouns, stretching for conceits that fit like my father's fireman pants. I had decided sometime back that I was to write down my feelings as they came drifting past. Failing that: formal poetry of some sort. The point was to write.
Between classes, I would slink from doorway to doorway, stopping at the vacant locker where I'd stowed my class materials (I wasn't fond of the locker I'd actually been assigned, positioned as it was between classmates I didn't particularly get along with) to switch out the power cells in my leaf. On occasion something would be missing, and I'd force myself to have some sort of reaction to the outrage. At moments like that it would make sense if I were to express some spontaneous emotion, preferably with some sort of physical display to accompany it. I'd fume and punch my locker, careful to avoid hitting the latch and cutting my hand. I liked to lay the meaty part of my fist right into the center of the door, which bowed itself nicely and made a deep, satisfying sound without endangering me physically. Predictably someone would notice my outburst and cover their mouth with their hand, appalled.
But he'd changed -- he swore to it, in fact.
It was a comparatively odd period for our clothing choices, and I recall gazing down at the gold necklace outside of his turtleneck, worn over the sweater, wondering where he'd found the money for it. He stank of citrus hair pomade, and immediately after eating with him on that first day, I'd rushed home and demanded that mother procure a canister the next time she ordered from the general store. It was a propitious gesture on my part, adjusting myself to look more like him, as he'd made quite a fuss about not feeling he was worthy of enjoying my company, mentioning some nonsense about not having any friends of his own at my -- our -- school. I humored him in this because I had decided I should acquire the connection. Socially speaking. Naturally, you understand.
In any case he was there, and we shared in a language. As I was not otherwise obligated by prior friendships at the school, he was quite enough for me, and we fell back in together as inseparable counterparts. I did not bring up old grudges as they seemed irrelevant to the evolving circumstances.
This is a fragment of something that will eventually be quite a bit longer.
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