Reality Boy (7 page)

“Let’s shake things up a little,” he says. “You can only sit down once you answer a question right.”

“That’s bullshit!” Karen says.

“Language, please. And no, it’s not bullshit. I guarantee that you will all be sitting inside of ten minutes. Watch.” He turns to me first. “Gerald, if I say that five plus six equals
x
, then what is the value of
x
?”

“Eleven,” I say.

“You may sit down.”

He turns to Karen. “If I say that
x
plus three equals twelve, then what is the value of
x
?”

“Nine,” she says.

“You may sit down,” he says again.

He turns to Taylor. “Say
m
equals ten. What would
x
equal in this equation? Four times
m
equals
x
.”

“The
x
would equal forty.”

“You may sit down.”

As I watch Fletcher, I realize he loves this job. He loves his life. He’s happy in the SPED room teaching all of us SPEDs. I don’t think I know one other adult who’s as happy as he is. Most of them just pretend all the time.

“You may sit down,” he says to whoever just answered.

When the last person sits, he says, “Now—that wasn’t so hard, was it? Tomorrow, we’ll come back and do some more. For now, let’s get you guys ready to go home.”

SPED class takes a while to get ready at the end of the day. Taylor needs to gather up her coat and her book bag and anything else she needs and has to be reminded five times not to forget anything in her desk. Deirdre needs help with her jacket, and her foot has fallen off the footrest again, so Fletcher puts it back on and secures it there, giving it a loving, sturdy wiggle.

Have you ever seen
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
with Jack Nicholson in it? SPED class reminds me of it. We’re not crazy or in some mental ward being psychologically abused by some sadist nurse, but we’re an accidental family, the same way they are. I know from driving past the mental hospital a few miles away that people on the outside look in and just see mental patients. Not people. That’s how people look at SPED, too. But we’re all people. Real people. I’m like Jack Nicholson’s character—once demanding, hard to handle, violent, and scary, but now electroshocked into brain toast by the golden rule of anger management:
Have no demands.

JACKO WALKS RIGHT
up to me when I get to the gym and says, “Okay, mon. I know you can’t fight here, but how about outside here? How about you and me?”

“Dude. You’re not Jamaican. Just give it up,” I say.

“What you mean, I’m not Jamaican?” he says.

“I mean you’ve lived in the Black Hills development since you were three. Two developments down from me, remember? And you go to a private school that costs, like, thirty grand a year.”

He pushes me. “You didn’t answer my question,
bumbaclaat
.” He says this in a really convincing Jamaican accent.

“Will I fight you?” I say. “No. Not even if you rip my head off and piss down my neck.”

My anger management coach would have a field day with Jacko. He has all the physical cues.
Clenched jaw. Shaking all over.
I walk past him to the speed bag and drop all my stuff on the floor, in the corner. I take off my shirt and start on the bag.

Jacko says something to me, but I don’t hear him.

I stop the bag with my left hand and ask, “So why do you call yourself Jacko, anyway?”

He doesn’t answer me, and after looking at me for a few seconds, he just walks away.
Fists tight. Muscles tensed.
I go back to the bag and superimpose faces on it. Tasha. Nanny. Tasha. Mom. Tasha. Nanny. Tasha. Nichols. Tasha. The cameraman from the first episode who said, “Look at his little pecker!” Tasha. Mom. Nanny. Dad. Nanny. Tasha. Mom.

I start to sweat. I feel the war paint dripping off my face and arms. The chief rolls down my back and onto the gym floor. Now I’m just Gerald. My arms burn. My neck burns. The bag hypnotizes me, and I’m mesmerized by how it seems to know when my hand is coming toward it. How it knows me. Saves me every day from going to jail.
Fuck jail.

There is a rough push from the side into my rib cage. My first reaction is to pull my right back and let it fly. I stop mid-punch and see it’s Jacko. He’s saying some shit I can’t keep up with. I start to back up. I make him dance with me. His two friends are behind him. They walk me around the gym, weaving in and out of the equipment.

He throws a slow punch and I dodge it. He throws a faster one and I dodge that, too. I feel the gym watching us. All other sounds have ceased except the drums in my head. I hop
from foot to foot. I feel at one with the universe doing this dance with Jacko. Like I’m on one of the chief’s peyote trips.

Jacko keeps throwing punches. I keep escaping them. I know how to catch his fist and flip him. I know how to knock him right out. I know how to kill him with my bare hands and eat his face, if I want. Instead, I make him dance. And dance. And dance. He’s starting to get tired. He’s getting slower. He’s sweating. I can see his American fat jiggling on the surface of his furious Jamaican muscles.

“Okay! Enough!” A trainer steps in. “You! Back to the bag,” he says to me. “And you—come with me,” he says to Jacko the middle-class fake Jamaican.

I go back to the bag, but instead of working out, I just pick up my things, put my shirt back on, and head out the door toward my car.

I AVOID THE
boxing gym for the rest of the week. I don’t want that Jacko asshole sending me away. I bet they already have a reality TV show for that.
Teen Jail. Pubescent Prison.
I bet I’d get paid a packet to get in there. I am the original reality TV fuckup. What better way to follow my downfall than to air it on national TV?

On Wednesday, I want to go work out because I miss it, but instead I buy a speed bag and when Dad gets home from work, we mount it on the wall in the garage, near my old rusty pull-up bar. He tries it but can’t keep up. When I show him how to do it, he smiles. And then he frowns.

And then the banging sound starts down in the basement
and we both leave the garage. He gets a drink and goes into his man cave. Mom throws random fruits and vegetables into the food processor in the kitchen and pretends she’s making a random fruit-and-vegetable puree, when we all know she’s just trying to be louder than the banging below her. I wonder, for the first time, if she does it to block out the sound not for our sake but for hers. I wonder, and then get instantly grossed out, if she and Dad even do it anymore.
You know how your mother is.
I go to my happy place and spend an hour in Gersday before I fall asleep.

It’s a nice night in Gersday. Dad and I play Ping-Pong in the basement. In Gersday, the basement is still Dad’s home gym, and I lift weights and he runs on the treadmill and then I hit the new speed bag a little and then we play Ping-Pong again and he beats me. When we go upstairs, he doesn’t offer me a drink, and he doesn’t pour himself one. Instead we eat oranges at the kitchen table while Mom tells us funny stories about what happened to her at work today. Because in Gersday, Mom has a job. She doesn’t just turn pages in magazines, make pretend fruit puree, and fast-walk to meditate, and there are no handmade centerpieces.

Then the phone rings and it’s Lisi and she wants to talk to me, because in Gersday, Lisi calls home and talks to me. We talk for an hour about how college is going and what it’s like in Glasgow. After I hang up, we play a family game of Scrabble and I win. Dad and Mom both high-five me. My score is 233.

I have this dream and it wakes me up at four in the morning on Friday. I can’t fall back to sleep because I can’t figure out what the dream means, but I know it means something important. The dream goes like this: I have something in my nose. In my left nostril. So I go to a mirror and I look up my nose and I see this big thing in there, like a huge booger, and so I reach in and I pull out a perfectly wrapped Hershey’s Kiss chocolate candy. It even has the little paper Kiss flag sticking out of the top. And in the dream, I think,
I wonder why this hasn’t melted yet
. And then I think,
Since it’s wrapped, I might as well eat it
. And then I unwrap the Hershey’s Kiss and I eat it.

I think this dream is about how messed up I am. I think it’s about eating the crap that comes out of my nose and pretending that it’s a perfectly wrapped Hershey’s Kiss.

On Friday, the last hour of SPED is awesome. More games with linear equations, this time with two variables. More of Deirdre’s sarcastic flirting. More of Fletcher’s happiness and encouragement as if he doesn’t know who I am. As if he thinks his time spent on me is worth it. Can’t he see the permanent boom mike suspended in front of me? The reflectors? The spots? Can’t he see the cameramen following me around the halls? The
behay-vyah
chart with all the black spots that I wear on my chest?

I have to go straight to work after school. Beth has me on register #5 and I tell her I can’t work #5.

“I have to work number seven. You know that,” I say.

She sighs.

“But it’s closer to the cooler and everything,” she says.

I shrug. “I really have to work on number seven.”

She gives me a nod and tells the woman on #7 to move to #5. She switches the money drawers even though we’re not even open and there’s $150 in both of them. Then she sighs again.

“You okay?” I ask.

“Yeah. Tough day.”

She’s never a downer like this. Beth is awesome. Like—always awesome. I would totally be into her if she wasn’t, like, fifty. She’s the perfect opposite of me—she lives in her own sunshine state. Postal abbreviation SS. It is on an entirely different coast from FS. Her coast has beaches and seventy-five-degree waves, and mine has cliffs and the water is too cold to swim in.

“Can I do anything to help?” I ask.

She shakes her head and smiles a little. “You can make sure everyone has enough ice.”

So I make sure everyone has enough ice and I start wrapping hot dogs and I do as much as I can to make Beth stop sighing. It’s not right, her being like this.

“Yo, Crapper!” Nichols says from the walkway. “You gonna be cool tonight or am I going to have to sic Todd on you?” Todd looks mortified. Not just because Nichols is an
idiot, but because he knows I could take him with my eyes closed. I keep wrapping hot dogs and hear nothing but the blood in my ears and my heartbeat.

And then she’s here.

She’s here saying, “Can I help you with those, Gerald?” and I’m so scared of what I’ll say or do that I just nod and we wrap hot dogs together silently. She gets the jumbo dogs and wraps them in silver. I wrap the regular ones in blue. The other five cashiers do other stuff. I don’t care. She smells like berries.

“How come you’re always at register number seven?” she asks.

“Dunno,” I say.

“Really?” she asks. “You don’t know?”

“Not as busy. And no credit card machine.”

“Ugh. I hate that thing,” she says. She crinkles her nose up when she says it.

“Yeah.”