Reality Boy (5 page)

During the first period, we get a chance to clean up our counter and refill the condiment stations. Because I’m brawny, I always take the big bottles of ketchup and mustard over to the stand and fill them. Plus, it gets me away from the other six cashiers, who tend to want to talk and get to know their coworkers. Most of the time, they talk about TV shows.

And I don’t watch TV.

Ever.

As I’m filling the second container of ketchup, the hockey-fan lady in the shit-kicker boots from before comes up to me and puts her hand on my shoulder.

“You’re Gerald, aren’t you?”

I stop and look at her. I can feel my face drop, and I nod.

She has tears in her eyes. “You are?”

I nod again.

She squeezes my arm and says, “I am so sorry for what those people did to you.”

I find myself paralyzed. It’s been more than ten years since it first aired, and I’ve tried to make it part of someone else’s childhood and move past it, like Roger says. I’ve tried to forget Network Nanny by not watching TV and by writing her pretend letters to tell her how I really felt. I’ve done all that. None of it made it go away. But this hockey lady is something brand-new. She just says it and I can’t move. Can’t speak.

“You okay?” she asks. “I know it’s none of my business, but I couldn’t help it.”

All I can do is nod.

“I always wanted to find you and take you up into my arms and give you a hug. You poor boy,” she says.

I nod again. I try to get back to my ketchup, but I can’t see anything through the glaze on my eyeballs. Everything is blurry.

“Do you mind if I hug you?” she asks.

I shake my head no.

And when she hugs me, something really weird happens. Before I can even figure out what’s going on, I’m crying. Like,
really
crying. It’s like someone is twisting open a spigot. I’m facing the ketchup containers, so no one at stand five can see this. And the harder I cry, the more she hugs me and the softer she is. The longer I cry, the more I realize what’s happening.

I am being hugged. In ten years, I have been recognized, scrutinized, analyzed, criticized, and even terrorized by a handful of the millions of
Network Nanny
viewers. Never was I hugged.

I am completely silent as I cry. She is completely silent as she hugs me. After a few moments, she reaches behind me and grabs a few napkins and hands them to me. Beth comes over and asks if everything’s okay and when she sees I’m crying, she pats me on the back and tells me she’ll take register #7 for the rest of the day if I need her to.

“No,” I say. “I’m fine.” I face the wall and the condiments and blow my nose and wipe my face. Beth goes back to the stand. I take a few deep breaths.

Hockey Lady squeezes my arm and says, “I’ll stay in touch.” Then she walks away.

I stand there for a minute and locate my invisible roll of plastic wrap and cover myself in it again—the barrier that keeps me from
them
. The armor that protects me from the whole fucking world. The polyethylene that keeps the tears in.

Register #1 Girl looks at me as I walk in the door and she has that look on her face like she wants to cry, too. I ignore her and go back to register #7. I make a pact with myself to never let anyone hug me again.

I’M STILL WEARING
my brand-new hockey jersey when I get in the house. I bought it so I don’t have to take any shit, just like the hug woman. I never got her name. I will never be able to see ketchup again without thinking about her.

Dinner is long over, but the house still smells of roast chicken and homemade gravy. Dad is in his man cave, doing whatever he does in there. Probably drinking. Tasha and her rat boy are downstairs blasting some awful country-and-western song and singing along.

Mom is at the kitchen table sawing off the bottoms of moisturizer bottles to use the inch and a half that never gets pumped up by the too-short pump straws.

She’s wearing safety glasses, wielding an electric knife—like the kind you slice turkey with. There are eight moisturizer bottles on the table, and next to them is a tub. She’s filling it with the lotion she gets out of the bottles that she’s sawing.

This is the shit she cares about. Not what Real Nanny told her about being fair and equal to all of her children. Not the twenty-one-year-old daughter getting planked in her basement and becoming more dependent by the day. I admit, part of me wants to take the electric knife and, well, you know.

She waves. I wave back and go upstairs to my room, where I can unsee what I just saw.

GERALD’S HAPPY PLACE
. That’s what the sign on my door says.
GERALD’S HAPPY PLACE
. I’ve had that there since I was thirteen and got suspended the first time for fighting. I mauled this kid’s face. Tom something.

Tom had it coming.

Back then, Tasha was still off pretending she was in college and Lisi was in high school while I was stuck in middle school with no one to protect me from all the assholes who called me the Crapper all day.

So I took a bite out of Tom What’s-His-Name’s face. Scarred forever. Mauled by a crazy, untamed warrior.

I mauled him so bad they sent me straight to Roger, the anger management guru. That first day, he asked me where I was happiest. I didn’t tell him about Gersday. I just said, “My room.” So we made this sign and I hung it on my door.

I guess I
am
happier here. I have my own bathroom with
a shower. I have a loud stereo. A computer. An Internet connection. Everything you need to separate yourself from everyone else.

Except: Tasha still lives in the basement. And Mom still never wanted me as much as she wanted that inch of moisturizer at the bottom of those bottles.

HERE’S HOW I
handle Monday mornings. I put on my headphones and listen to a crazy playlist of tribal drumming from Native American powwows. Lisi got it for me at a powwow she went to with her stoner boyfriend last year.

I listen to it from the minute I pack my backpack to the minute I park in the school parking lot. If I’m early, I even sit there and listen until the very last minute. Then I put on imaginary war paint. Three red lines under my eyes. One black stripe across my face. The same red stripes down my arms. One red stripe from my bottom lip down my chin. I have already decided that if I ever graduate from this shithole, I will wear the real paint on graduation day.

When I go into school, I am a warrior. I’m noble. Fair. I’m the chief of my own tribe. I
could
scalp you. I
could
be dangerous. But I choose not to, which is why I’m the chief.

Up until this year, things were different. I wasn’t choosing anything. I still had all Roger’s bad anger words in my vocabulary—
should
,
have to
,
deserve
. I was still out of control.

It wasn’t just Tom. There were others, too. The broken arm in freshman year. And nose. And that time I tried to crush a kid’s neck last year. I memorized the walls of the middle school principal’s office. I memorized every inch of the high school’s in-school suspension room. I memorized every time they told me I had
one more chance
. That was five chances ago.

Roger was never impressed. Now he is, though. Because now I know about my triggers and how to block them all out. I put on my war paint and my feathers and I walk into high school and play chief.

“Hey, Gerald. I heard we won yesterday.” That’s the kid whose locker is next to mine. He’s a cool kid, pretty much. Plays in the jazz band and smokes a lot of pot.

“Three to one,” I say.

“Nice jersey,” he says.

I look down at my jersey and remember the hockey lady and how this is my not-taking-any-shit jersey. It’s like I’ve got a double layer of chief on today.

“Thanks.”

He nods and goes to his homeroom. I get my books and head to Mr. Fletcher’s room. That’s the SPED room to everyone else.

“Hey, Gerald!”

“Hi, Gerald!”

I wave and look at the floor.

“Nice shirt, Gerald!”

All you dipshits who think the SPED room is full of half-wits are wrong. This is the best room in school because no one gives a shit about how bad you are or how dumb you are or how you limp or stutter or how you can’t think right because you spent most of your childhood crying in your bedroom because you were dubbed
the Crapper
before you ever even got to first grade.

No one cares what clothes you wear, what brand name your shoes are, how rich your family is, or how many songs you’ve uploaded to your iPod. No one cares about my car. No one cares about my gated community. No one cares about my past. They know, I’m sure, but no one has ever mentioned it, and if someone did, I think Mr. Fletcher would probably shut them up faster than they could even say it.

Mr. Fletcher is a real chief. Compared to him, I’m like a chief in training, because he has patience that I will never have—dealing with violent little assholes like me, who don’t need to be in his classroom, and then helping Deirdre do everything because she’s got cerebral palsy. And some days Jenny starts having a fit and throwing shit around and he has to calm her and get her to the nurse for whatever the nurse does to make her normal again.

“Gerald, are you still working out in that gym?” Jenny asks me. “Because you’re getting bigger every time I see you.”

“Yeah. Man, you’re buff,” Karen says.

“Oh my god, you guys. Shut up!” That’s Kelly—he’s a guy but he’s named Kelly, which is just messed up, considering he’s been slow since birth. Seriously. If you have a slow kid, don’t give him a girl’s name. Right?

“Yeah,” I say. “Shut up.”

Deirdre aims her electric wheelchair toward me and then reaches over and squeezes my arm. “Soon you’ll be too hot for us retards,” she says, and laughs. Sometimes when Deirdre laughs, she spits a little. None of us laugh at her, because we’re a family—which is something the school guidance counselor can’t understand when I tell him this.

“If you had a chance to get out of the special education program, you wouldn’t take it?” he asked me during our monthly meeting last month.

“No way. I love those guys.”

“But it’s not about them. It’s about you. You don’t need to be in the class, do you?”

“I don’t know. Depends what you mean by
need
,” I said.

I
need
to not be on my guard all the time. I
need
to not have people call me names. I
need
a place where I don’t need war paint to survive. And that’s the SPED room. The war paint I wear just to get from my car
to the SPED room
. It’s for lunch. For the mainstream gym class I have to take. It’s for just being here and not somewhere else where no one knows who I am… like South America.

Fletcher says, “Okay. Get your math books out. You’re all going to be calculating linear equations before Friday or I’ll get fired and have to live on the streets.”

I knew how to calculate linear equations three years ago, but I open my book and follow instructions. I’m not playing stupid. I’m just safer here. Or everyone else is safer because I’m here. Or something.

They put that Tom kid in my lunch period. Which was their mistake, because all he’s wanted to do since I ate a hole through his face in eighth grade is kill me. He sends me looks from FS all the time. I stamp them with
RETURN TO SENDER
and eat my food. But one day, the kid’s gonna break. I can see it. Before I graduate, he’s going to sneak up on me and whale on me hard and I’m going to have to defend myself and I’ll be the one who ends up incarcerated.

Which I refuse to do. Which is why this war paint is so good. Because I know it will allow me to lie down and take it.

Even if he bites my face off.

Even if he kills me.

I can take it.

I’ll just skip off into Gersday in my moccasins and feathers and I’ll make my wild calls and dance my wild dances and eat Indian ice cream until I’m finally free. I almost wish he’d just fucking do it already. I’m pretty sure everyone would be happier.

No one talks to me here outside of SPED kids. No teachers. Not even the lunch ladies. I told Roger once that they all think I’m about to hop up on the table and do a shit.

“I doubt it,” he said. “You haven’t done that since you were little, right?”

“Yeah. But I can see it. They want me to.”

“Huh,” he said.

I’m right. They all want me to. And I want to entertain them again, just like when I was a kid. It would give them something to talk about. Something to text each other about. LOL! ROTFLMAO! WTF? GTFO!

The guidance counselor used to say that the only reason I didn’t have friends was because I had a wall up. First, he’s a moron. Second, who the fuck wouldn’t have a wall up if they were me? My wall has war paint on it, too. It’s a picture of a fearsome beast inside the outline of a television.

I’D GRADUATED FROM
behavior charts to chore charts—step two of the 1-2-3 program. Real Nanny kept smiling at me from the sidelines, but Fake Nanny was stricter. My crapping really put her off. Which is why I did it. But hey—I hadn’t punched a wall in a month, so she’d solved
that
problem, right?