Bad Kid (24 page)

To my right, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror over the couch. My stomach did another somersault as Dick and Jane started their car across the street. Looking at my reflection, I saw that my hair had become completely mashed to the left side of my head. I was covered in a glistening sheen of sweat that had washed away the powder on my face. A horrible, subterranean zit had begun to swell on my right cheek. Sylvia's thick application of eyeliner had run down both of my cheeks. I looked like a dandy teenage coal miner in a heat wave.

Everything was crooked, dripping, misplaced, and sad. As the happy family outside zoomed away, my reflection reminded me,
You will never be like them
.

Sometime later I woke up to a clock that read 7:37. It meant nothing to me. I'd slept for either thirty minutes or twelve hours. I knocked on Sylvia's locked bedroom door, but she didn't answer. I slipped on my shoes and walked to the driveway. Observing the quality of light outdoors still didn't help me figure out the time. So I sat in my car and smoked for twenty minutes until I could tell that the sky was getting darker, not brighter. I'd been asleep on the couch for half a day.

I drove with the windows down, letting the warm August wind blow through my hair. I bought a pack of gum, a Slurpee, and Marlboro Ultra Lights with my last eight dollars. The pregnant, 7-Eleven clerk looked at me fearfully throughout our
exchange, keeping one of her hands out of sight behind the counter. In the car, I looked at myself in the mirror. I was a paler, more corpsey-looking version of the person I'd been that morning, the creep who'd watched that family through the window like a junkie sniper.

As the sun disappeared and the stars came out, I drove, and drove, and drove.

G
reg had disappeared. Sylvia was too much. San Antonio was no more a home to me than Seguin, where I was starting my senior year. I toned down my look for the first day and wore a vest over a T-shirt and blue jeans with combat boots. I wore my hair down and shaggy, and not a drop of makeup. Unfortunately, the day before I'd gotten baked and overplucked my eyebrows to within an inch of their lives.

“Honey, what's wrong?” my mother asked at dinner. “You look worried . . . or suspicious . . . Are you surprised?”

The next day at school, I felt like an alien. In spite of my toned-down clothing, some of the kids were still perplexed by me. By midweek I had the nickname “RuPaul,” which reminded me how far from the real world I was. Seguin kids were so taken aback by me that their nearest cultural reference point was a seven-foot-tall, black drag queen.

That first week of school was the longest I'd been away from Max. On Friday morning I put my weekend bag in the trunk of my car and slogged through the day, which was full of atrocities. I met one of the “alternative” kids in first period, but he'd somehow never heard of the Violent Femmes. At lunch I was forced to tuck in my T-shirt by a one-hundred-year-old science teacher with a tracheotomy. After English class I watched a hallway fight between two Hispanic girls, who were coating their faces with Vaseline between blows.

“Why do they do that?” I asked a girl with a long braided ponytail under her cowboy hat.

“Aw, hell, RuPaul. Don't you know nothin'?” she replied. “Keeps their faces from gettin' scratched. Those wetbacks are smart!”

I couldn't leave fast enough when the 3 p.m. bell rang. Max's mother was the only person home when I got to their house. We sat on the couch in silence, watching television.

“Have you talked to Max today?” she finally asked.

“No. Why?” I asked, eating a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos she'd given me.

“No reason. How is school going? As awful as you'd thought?”

“It's pretty crappy. I can't believe my mom moved us to that town.”

“Your mom does the best she can,” Ruth said sharply. “It's hard.”

“Oh. Sorry,” I said, realizing I'd upset her. “I didn't mean anything. I just . . .”

“No, I'm sorry,” she said, patting my leg and getting up. “I had a long night.”

The front door opened and Ruth went to the foyer. I could hear her and Max exchanging heated words.

“You call next time, dammit,” she said, storming down the hall to her bedroom.

“Hey, mister,” said Max behind me as he grabbed my shoulders. I looked up from the couch and saw his upside-down face smiling at me. “How's my little Sequined Matador?”

In Max's room, we sat against his bed. He let out a long, tired sigh and pulled out a can of Scotchgard from beneath his bed.

“Max, I can't,” I said, placing my hand over his on the canister.

“Aww, come on, man.”

“No. I just don't want to get fucked up for a while,” I said, still reeling from the slaughterhouse trip with Sylvia.

He slid the Scotchgard back under the bed and told me about his first week at school, mentioning a bunch of names I'd never heard before. He seemed jumpy and preoccupied, getting up every fifteen minutes to take a phone call.

“So we're going to my friend Jamie's party tonight.”

“Cool,” I shrugged. “Who's Jamie?”

“She's this girl I used to date,” Max answered, beckoning me into the kitchen.“It'll be cool,” he said, taking out two thermoses and looking down the hall to make sure Ruth wasn't coming. “Mom's pissed at me because I stayed out last night.”

“Like, all night?”

“Yeah, but I was just with Sean,” he said, pouring me a rum and Coke and tightening the lid. “She didn't have to freak out so much.”

“Well, she was probably worried about you.”

Max stopped pouring and stared at me like I'd challenged him.

“What?” I asked. “I'd be worried about you too.”

In his car we shared a joint. As the interior filled with smoke and the sun set, his dimples came out and everything started to feel right. I told him about the crazed, Vaseline-faced girls of Seguin High School and he detailed all Sean's dumb, macho antics at the previous night's party. I pulled out our case of mixtapes and popped one in the cassette player. We tooled through New Braunfels for an hour, laughing and singing, driving nowhere in particular.

“Hey, I need to make a pit stop,” Max said, popping in a different mixtape and pressing “play.” We pulled off the road and drove through a grove of trees as “That's When I Reach for My Revolver” blasted through the speakers. Bleary-eyed and baked, we screamed the song out the windows. Each beat of the drum hit like a sledgehammer crashing down on the lonely, Max-less week that had preceded this night. At the end of a dirt road we arrived at a small pond. Three cars were parked in a circle with their hazard lights blinking. A group of a dozen or so SHARPs sat on the cars' hoods and bumpers, drinking beers and smoking cigarettes.

“Stay here,” said Max as he parked the car. “I'll be right back.”

I grabbed the door handle, starting to get out. “Well, I can go if—”

“No!” he barked. “Stay here!”

Max walked toward the group and greeted them. He shook hands and hugged some of the guys in that awkward masculine way, making sure their torsos didn't touch while aggressively patting each other's backs. I recognized Sean and a few other guys, but most of them were older SHARPs I'd never seen.

Slowly the group started to walk in a circle, like roosters—the
way they had that night at Club FX two years earlier. As the SHARPs marched and thrashed their heads, clouds of dust rose from the ground and hovered in the orange light of the blinking flashers. In the spaces between their pacing bodies I noticed a boy, around fourteen. Through the haze I realized it was Rocky, the little, ginger-headed kid with freckles I'd seen at SHARP parties before. One by one, the SHARPs began taunting Rocky and smacking his head, pushing him back and forth across the circle between them like a beach ball. The kid took the abuse for a while, his fists clenched at his sides. He sneered at them to seem threatening, but he looked like a frightened kid in his older brother's oversize, big-boy clothes. As they called him a pussy, a little bitch, and a faggot, my body slid deeper into the passenger seat. I was becoming small. I wanted to disappear.

It wasn't until one of the SHARPs spit in Rocky's face that the kid reacted, spinning and screaming as he punched blindly anywhere he could, like an angry dreidel. His reaction was immediately crushed by a dozen angry SHARPs, all punching, kicking, and beating him at once. As a great, flashing cloud of dust enveloped them, I could hear the kid scream and cough, but he never yelled, “Stop!”

In the blinking hazard lights I caught glimpses of Max's face—a sneer of teeth and saliva, an open, screaming mouth, a tightened, swinging fist. After a few moments the group stopped. As the cloud of dust around them dissipated, I could see them standing in a circle and looking down.

“Get up,” yelled Max.

Rocky stayed on the ground in a ball, covering his head and begging, “Please, please, please . . .”

As Max reached down and helped the boy up, I thought I saw a trace of the friend I knew. Max threw Rocky's arm around his shoulder and helped him limp to a car, where he leaned against the hood. The kid's bottom lip was broken in the middle, oozing a solid crimson line of blood that ran down the center of his chin, neck, and chest. A mound of swelling flesh surrounded his eye. Max smiled flatly, rubbed Rocky's head, and embraced him. And then they all did. The fight club morphed into an agro love-in as the boys started hugging and shaking hands and passing each other beers.

In the blinking lights I caught Sean looking in my direction. The smile evaporated from his face as he realized I was there.

“What the fuck?” he asked Max, pointing at me. “You brought him?”

“Yeah. So what?” Max replied.

“That's not fucking cool, man.” Sean marched to the passenger door and kicked it, glaring at me. “This shit isn't
for
him.”

“Calm the fuck down,” Max said. “He's cool.”

“Oh yeah?” replied Sean, shoving his index finger in Max's chest. “Who says?”

“I SAY!” said Max, his voice bellowing through the trees.

Sean smirked at me through the car window and knocked on the glass, saying, “Hey Davey. Why don't you roll down the window?”

I reached for the window crank before Max barked, “Do
not
roll it down!”

“I said roll down the fucking window!” Sean screamed. Slowly I rolled it down, my hands shaking as the other SHARPs began to circle the car. “So Davey,” Sean said with a huge, mocking grin as he leaned through the open window, “wanna join the club?”

“Come the fuck on, Sean,” said Max. “Leave him alone.”

“Let's make him a SHARP, Max! He's your best fucking friend, right?”

The SHARPs surrounded the car now, each of them still breathing hard from the beatdown they'd just given Rocky. As they glared at me through the windshield, it occurred to me that they weren't worn out but warmed up. All I could think about was the gun.

Did the gun belong to one of them, or was it one of their dads'? Was I just really messed up that night and only thought I saw a gun? If the gun belonged to one of them, did they have it on their person? Was Sean about to grin a little bigger at me and tap the shiny, black tip of that gun on the windshield?

“Get out!” yelled Sean as he reached out and opened the door. Max jumped in front of him and slammed it, grabbing Sean's shirt and shoving him away. The other SHARPs looked at the two of them, and then at one another. Instead of retreating, they each took a few steps closer to the car. It was the first time I'd seen Max's authority met with anything other than immediate obedience. He was the only person in my corner, and he couldn't protect me alone. In the rearview mirror I saw two guys standing by the trunk. Another with a bullring in his nose leaned down to stare at me through the driver's-side window. Through the settling dust ahead of me I could see Rocky limping forward with a glimmer in his eye, a look that suggested that he wanted to beat me more than anyone. And who could blame him? By beating me
with
them, he could really commune with this club he'd just joined. I was the guy they could
all
get their rocks off on by pulverizing. There wouldn't be limits with me. They wouldn't have to be careful. It wasn't
a beat-in or an initiation. I was an outsider. And I was in the wrong place.

In the tension of the standoff I felt like my senses were heightened. I could hear the distant hum of traffic on I-35, the Doppler waves of crickets in the woods, the mechanical click of the car stereo turning the cassette over.

Click
.

Suddenly, and with overwhelming volume, Erasure's “Oh L'Amour” began to pulse from the car stereo. I sat still, too afraid to move, worried that reaching to mute the sound system would be perceived as gayer than the sound of the song itself. So I sat there, with my Patty Duke bob and my rum and Coke, surrounded by skinheads, as Andy Bell longingly wailed, “
Mon amour. What's a boy in love supposed to do?
”

It was as if time stopped, like they were all too stunned by the sheer queerness of the song to care as Max slid into the driver's seat. The plaintive, fey cry of the lisping vocalist was too shocking for them to process as Max started the car. The propulsive twinkle of synthetic harpsichords was such a diversion that all they could do was stand there as we drove away.

In actuality, the sweet, giddy sound of Erasure probably didn't hypnotize anyone. I think it enraged them so much that allowing Max to leave was the only way they could be sure they wouldn't kill me.

We emerged from the grove of trees and onto the highway as a fine mist of rain coated the windshield. We didn't speak. I felt like I should appreciate Max in that moment, as if I should've been thankful to him for getting me out of there. But what I couldn't stop thinking about was that
he
was the one who had brought me. Max, like Sylvia before him, was the one who exposed
me to the very danger he saved me from. So I didn't feel protected. I wasn't impressed or turned on. I was disappointed. Half an hour ago I'd been with my best friend. But now I was in the car with a sadistic, macho shithead, one of those monsters from the dance floor two years ago. My
new
best friend had just become nothing more than the guy who had beaten up my
old
best friend.

“Look, that was just an initiation, okay?” he said after a long spell of silence. “Will you fucking talk to me?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I don't just go out and beat people up, okay? I used to, but not anymore.”

“Well, Sean does, I bet.”

“I'm not Sean,” yelled Max. “He enjoys it too much. It's not supposed to be fun.”

“Then what's the fucking point of it?” I yelled at him, for the first time. “Why would you want to do that to someone? To anyone?”

“What?” Max said, looking at me with genuine bewilderment.

“Why would you do that if it doesn't make anyone feel good?”

“You don't understand, David.”

But I did understand. And I knew it was beneath Max. And I couldn't shake the feeling that my watching it happen had sullied our friendship. “Why would you fucking bring me to that?”

“Why shouldn't you be able to go?” he sneered.

“Because I'm not like you,” I murmured, more aware of it than I'd ever been. “And I don't want to be.” I stared in silence at the road the rest of the way home, knowing that I couldn't take back what I'd just said.