The Boy Recession (9 page)

“A rock star?” Darcy raises one eyebrow. “Your band is fictional.”

“Currently fictional, yes,” Derek says, nodding. “But until we get our record deal, I guess I could be a stay-at-home dad.”

Over at the other end of the table, Aviva is pouring us three no-rum-and-Cokes.

“Someone needs to put these freshmen in their place,” she says. “I just got hit on by Axe-body-spray guy.”

As Darcy takes her plastic cup from Aviva, Derek looks offended.

“President Ryan!” he says. “You’ll drink that, and you won’t drink my MSB?”

“No, thanks,” Darcy says, and meets his eyes with a smirk. “I don’t settle for the second best of anything.”

“Hi, girls! Happy homecoming!”

Bobbi Novak comes skipping up to us in her tiny T-shirt, frayed denim miniskirt, and UGGs, holding a Wisconsin cosmo. She kisses each of us on the cheek.

“Darcy, are those new boots? So cute! And I wanted to tell you you’re doing
such
a great job as president! Finally, some girl power!”

Aviva and I look on with amusement as Bobbi gushes to Darcy, who’s trying not to roll her eyes.

“Bobbi,” I say. “How’s Eugene doing?”

“He’s going to text me when he leaves the hospital,” Bobbi says. “He had to go to the emergency room!”

“What’s going on between you two?” Aviva asks.

Aviva is less subtle than I am. She loves gossip.

“Well, I guess we’re just friends for now,” Bobbi says with a giggle. “But he’s such a great guy! He’s, like, the biggest sweetheart. I never knew him that well before. I mean, last year he got me these organic hair extensions that are only available in Canada, but that was just, like, a business transaction….”

“How can hair extensions be organic?” Darcy asks.

“They take hair from someone who’s on an all-organic diet,” Bobbi says. Then she adds, “With their permission, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Eugene’s just so… different from the guys I’ve been with before,” Bobbi says, looking down at her phone.

Just then, Eugene comes in, sitting high on Josh’s and Chung’s shoulders. Once they’re inside, we can see Eugene’s right arm is in a sling. Hunter is behind them, holding a piece of paper and shaking his head.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Eugene calls out.
“Ladies and gentlemen!”

A freshman girl turns down the iPod so everyone can hear Eugene. “I give you…” Eugene begins dramatically as he reaches down and takes the piece of paper Hunter’s holding.

“My
clavicle
!”

With a flourish, he waves his X-ray, with the bones glowing pink from the red Christmas lights behind them. A huge rush of applause goes up, and Bobbi emerges from the crowd, streaking through like a comet with a fake blond extension for a tail. As soon as Eugene gets down from his human throne, she jumps on him and starts to make out with him.

“Ew, look at his tongue. He’s like a snake,” Aviva says, sipping her no-rum-and-Coke.

“The way people react to football players is beyond ridiculous. What would they do if the team had actually
won
the game?” Darcy asks.

“They would take their tops off,” Aviva says. “Or at least unbutton a few buttons.”

I hate to give pervy Eugene credit, but after those guys arrive, the party changes. Before, we were separate people in a cold space. Now everyone’s all pressed together, warm and touching, sharing breath and body heat. Girls are getting wild and unwinding their scarves, and all the people bumping into me makes me feel like I’m actually drunk. At one point, I see Hunter sitting on the loft ladder, next to the iPod speakers. His neck is flushed red, and he doesn’t seem to notice that Diva Price is standing next to him. I glance away for a second, and when I look back, Diva is on his lap. He looks as startled by the sudden movement as I am—did she fall on top of him? But then Hunter shrugs and relaxes, even though Diva’s got her arm around his shoulders.

I usually don’t think about Diva too much, but right now, her thick thighs are making me irrationally mad. Why would you wear see-through tights when your thighs are that big? And her skirt is way too short. Then I look at Hunter and feel a familiar tug when I see his hand on her shoulder. I guess I’ve been watching his drum lessons and I’ve gotten to know his long, careful musician’s fingers. When he taught the kids to hold drumsticks, he told them, “You gotta let your hands be loose. Nice and easy.” And even though Hunter isn’t playing the drums right now, that’s the right phrase for him:
nice and easy
.

“You think she’s gonna eat him alive?” Aviva asks, watching the scene unfold between Diva and Hunter.

“I love him,” I blurt out.

“What?” Darcy’s blue eyes are huge.

“You
love
him?” Aviva sounds skeptical.

“Okay, no, no,” I say. “I don’t love him. I just don’t know how to announce something like that. I only see this kinda stuff in romantic comedies.”

“You
like
him,” Aviva says, as though she’s correcting my grammar.

“Yes,” I say miserably.

“You like
Hairface
Hunter?” Darcy says.

“I like him,” I repeat, hopelessly.

The three of us are standing and watching as Diva brushes Hunter’s hair back from his face.

“Push her off,” Aviva says to me. “Push her off his lap.”

“I can’t push her off!”

Aviva and Darcy start coming up with other plots, but I feel helpless, standing there hoping that she doesn’t kiss him.
Please, don’t let her kiss him.

Y
ou got in late last night!” my mom says when she comes into my room.

It’s 3
PM
on the Saturday after homecoming, and I’m still in bed. I’m actually awake—I’m sitting up against the wall with my guitar on my stomach, picking out chords—but I’m still in bed. I love my bed so much that sometimes I stay in it for a whole weekend.

Most moms would probably be pissed if they came into their son’s room and he was lazing under a pile of crap that included an open package of those orange peanut-butter crackers. Not my mom. She also doesn’t mind that I was out ’til 1
AM
last night, when Dave, who was angry about being designated driver for the homecoming party, literally pushed me out of his slow-moving car and onto my lawn. All she says when she sits down on my super-comfortable
broken-down mattress is: “I’m glad you could sleep in this morning! You need it. How was the game last night?”

She reaches over and brushes my hair out of my eyes.

“Good,” I tell her, yawning and dropping my guitar pick onto my blanket. “Eugene got hurt, but he’ll be okay.”

“He got to play in the game?” my mom says. “Good for him!”

“Nah. Actually,” I say, “it was kind of a… warm-up injury. I don’t know if he’ll ever get to play.”

“I’m sure he will,” my mom says. “He needs time to learn the game. He’ll get his chance.”

My mom is used to underdogs from her job with the Milwaukee public school system, where she does art therapy with “problem kids.” That sounds pretty depressing, but my mom is good at it, and the kids like her. She’s big into self-expression, so her students get to decide on their own projects. This one kid who stabbed someone in a fight started working with my mom on a Jackson Pollock project, where he would go in a room and throw paint around and make these gigantic, crazy paintings. He got so into it that he started bringing paintbrushes to school instead of knives.

Her teaching style—valuing self-expression and personal freedom—definitely shows up in her parenting, too. When I was growing up, she would let me wear whatever I wanted. I could wear my Halloween costume to school and refuse to cut my hair for four years, and she was cool with it.

When I get my pick and start playing the guitar again, my mom watches me for a few minutes, smiling.

“Did you write that one?” she asks.

“Yeah. I’m starting a song,” I tell her. “I never finish them, though.”

“I have a bunch of staff paper downstairs that I took from the school,” my mom says. “You should write down what you’ve written so far!”

“Yeah. I have to figure this part out first,” I say. “I keep messing it up.”

“Well, I stole a lot of paper,” my mom says, winking, and then whispers, “
So you can make lots of mistakes.
”

My mom gives me a hug, which is really brave, because I haven’t showered and I still smell like Dave’s car. She doesn’t seem to mind. Then she gets up, and as she pulls the door shut behind her, she says, “There’s bacon downstairs, too.”

Half an hour later, I’m still in bed. The only thing that’s changed is that a pile of blank staff paper and a plate of bacon crumbs are in bed with me. I’m still leaning against the wall, picking at my guitar, when my dad comes bursting into my room.

“Let’s get going!” he says, clapping his hands. His clap is so loud it hurts my ears. “Let’s go and get a pumpkin.”

“What?” I yawn at him. “When is Halloween? Soon?”

“Halloween is next week!”

Whoa. Seriously?

“We’ve gotta get ready,” my dad is saying. “We’ve gotta stock up on candy, we’ve gotta put the spiderwebs out on the bushes, get the fog machine out…. What if we did a haunted-house thing this year? Whadda you think about that? You and I could hide in the bushes, and when kids come out, we’ll jump out….”

This plan sounds like something we could get sued for. Plus, I’m not sure I want to spend Halloween night hiding out in a bush with my dad, waiting to jump out and make little kids cry. I’ve gotta go out with Derek and six cans of shaving cream and make bigger people cry. But for now, to make my dad happy, I’ll go get a pumpkin.

Let me give you some advice here: People who want to have the sex talk with you will act the same way as people who want to murder you. First they get you in their car, so they’re in control and you can’t escape. Then they drive you someplace in the middle of nowhere. Today my dad takes me to a farm on the outskirts of Whitefish Bay. On the hunt for one of those huge monster pumpkins they inject steroids into, my dad treks farther and farther back in the field, back where there’s a lot of wet grass and mud and animal shit, and my sneakers are sinking into the ground. When we’re back in the last few rows of pumpkins—
this is the isolation thing I’m talking about—my dad says, “So I saw Gene Pluskota at the hardware store this morning. He said Eugene has a girlfriend!”

Wow. Eugene works fast. When did he tell his dad about Bobbi?
It had to be sometime between midnight last night, when they stopped making out long enough to agree that they were actually dating, and 9
AM
, when my dad was at the hardware store.

“So…” my dad follows up, grunting as he rolls this huge pumpkin over. No go. It’s all rotten on the back side. “Anything going on with you in that department?”

Crap.
Well, I guess he had to ask about my love life eventually. But I don’t have a lot to tell him. Some people think Eugene and I are dating, because we’re always together and he pays for my food. I do hook up with girls, but my hook-ups are pretty sketchy. Usually I’m drunk or the girl’s drunk, or she’s pissed at another dude who rejected her, and we’re in some weird location. Once I made out with a girl in Dave’s smelly parked car in the Applebee’s parking lot. Maybe it means something that girls kiss me only in dark places. I tell my dad, “Uh, not too much going on.”

I go over to this huge pumpkin and try to check out the bottom side.

“Well, I think your stock is up,” my dad tells me. “I think you’re growing into your looks,” he continues.

Uh… What? Seriously, Dad? What is that, the consolation prize of compliments?

My dad’s comment does remind me of something Eugene said last night, though. When we were waiting for his X-rays, he told me Bobbi’s friends have been talking about me. “Some of them are hot for you, Huntro,” he told me. “They said your hair was cute.” Then he corrected himself. “Well, they called it ‘messy cute.’ ”