True Letters from a Fictional Life (4 page)

Derek and I were tiptoeing
through the school parking lot's slush the next afternoon when a truck roared toward us. We trotted out of the way, but the driver still slammed on his brakes and slid. Ready to yell, we both looked over at him, but he was staring at Aaron Foster, who had slipped in the slush just ahead of the truck.

He was sporting a typical Aaron Foster ensemble beneath his unbuttoned blue peacoat: tight white jeans and a purple T-shirt. He gave the driver a weary glare as he got up, and then he continued walking to his car. His trousers were soaked.

“Faggot!” the driver shouted as he accelerated out of the parking lot.

I started to walk over to Aaron's car, but he had hopped in quickly and his reverse lights flashed white. As he backed past me, he kept his head turned, but when he looked forward to drive away, I could tell he was holding back tears.

“Good grief, dude,” I muttered.

“But why does he wear that stuff to school?” said Derek. “All those girls he hangs out with—not one of them has the sense to give him good advice about how to avoid attracting attention.”

“Maybe we should say something to him.”

Derek shrugged. “Man, my father would have something to say to me if I went to school dressed like that.”

I nodded. But watching that scene in the parking lot made me feel sick. That night I ended up scribbling Aaron a letter.

Tuesday, April 12th

Hey, Aaron,

We don't know each other all that well, so it probably seems weird that I'm writing you a letter. I hope you won't take it the wrong way. I'm probably going to end up saying something stupid and insensitive, but I swear I'm writing with good intentions.

I'm sorry that you're always getting picked on, and I'm sorry you had to deal with that kid in the parking lot today. And I'm sorry that I was one of the guys who used to give you a hard time. But honestly, why do you wear such flaming queer outfits to school? You're inviting trouble. In a perfect world, you
could wear whatever you want, I guess, but look around you, man. This isn't San Francisco. It pays to try to fit in a little.

Here's another thing I don't understand. If you're gay, and I've heard that you've admitted it, then why do you have to act like a girl? If a boy likes other boys, why would he be attracted to a guy who walks and talks like a girl? There are probably a few other gay kids in the school, but I'm sure they're scared to come out because they don't want to be associated with you.

Here's what I wish you'd do: go buy yourself a pair of loose-fit Levi's and a plain blue T-shirt. Buy a pair of Chuck Taylors and scuff them up in the street. Wash all that gel out of your hair, dry it with a towel, and use your hands to comb it. Do some sit-ups and push-ups. Listen to Led Zeppelin. Watch a hockey game. Then you can come sit with us at lunch.

James

Of course I didn't send the letter—I never sent any of them, but Aaron reached the same conclusions all by himself. When he walked into English class the next morning, I actually didn't recognize him for a minute. He wore loose jeans, a white T-shirt, and a blue hoodie. His blond hair, usually standing in spikes, fell deflated across his forehead. He looked pale and sad, but I couldn't help thinking that his life was about to improve dramatically.

Mr. Breyer assigned Aaron to my small group to do peer review work on essays we'd just written. Our third partner was a girl named Tara, whose contributions to peer review
consist mostly of loud gum chewing and eye rolling. She once yelled at me for using the word
constitutes
. She said I was being stuck-up.

“Hey, man,” I whispered to Aaron once we'd pulled our desks together and before Tara had made it across the room. “I'm sorry about what happened yesterday. You know, in the parking lot.”

“Yeah, some people are jerks,” Aaron said without looking up.

“I would've said something to the guy, but—”

“I don't want to talk about it,” Aaron interrupted as he dug through his backpack. He pulled out a math notebook and a pack of colored markers and put them on his desk, as though he'd need them in English.

“Okay,” I said quietly. “I like the new look.”

Tara arrived just then, and they started chatting it up about her new shoes. I'm not sure if Aaron even heard my last comment.

The next period I had health class in the same room. One moment I was listening to Tara mispronounce
paragraph
, and the next I was listening to the baseball coach wing a lecture about sexually transmitted diseases. To his credit, Coach Williams had gone online to find photos of genital chancres. Those woke me up, as did the back row's fake puking sounds. For a minute, it seemed like Williams had some valuable information to pass along, but then, as he was talking about the importance of condoms, he dropped a bomb that made
me gnaw the end of my pen flat. “Condoms are especially important for gay men because of the AIDS.” And then with his hand raised, like a Boy Scout taking an oath to tolerance, Williams swore, “I don't have any problems with guys who like other guys. If that's your choice, that's your choice.”

I sat there thinking about all the nights I'd spent trying to fall asleep, trying to reprogram my dreams, willing myself to feel the way about girls I knew I was supposed to. The word
choice
had never occurred to me in relation to the way I felt about boys and girls. It was involuntary. Like a reflex. I wanted to turn in my seat and gauge Aaron's reaction, but I just stared at my desk, punishing myself with the flavor of Bic plastic and ink.

That evening I had to
go interview my neighbor, Mr. Kelly. I was writing my history term paper on the Vietnam War protests. My dad had suggested I interview Mr. Kelly, who lives up our road and always stops to talk to my parents when he's walking his dog past our yard. My dad said the old guy would give me a version of history “I hadn't listened to carefully.”

I tried to warm Mr. Kelly up by saying that it must have been fun to be young in the late sixties, when the hippie scene was at its height. Looking at me in disbelief, he barked: “Were you there, Manfretti?” He says I look like a guy he knew in college, so he calls me that: Manfretti. “I don't remember
seeing you back there in all that late-sixties' fun. Let me tell you what your peace and love dipshits were all about.

“My father and his brother and his buddies fought in the Pacific Islands against the Japanese. My uncle never came home from that war. He died out there battling the Jap Empire. And if you think they were nice guys, the Japanese, fellas we should've sat down with and offered a joint and bootlegs of the Grateful Dead to, ask the grandparents of your Korean and Chinese friends. But don't mix them up. They do not like that. Believe me.

“At the end of the war, the entire country's celebrating that it's all over, and the economy's going gangbusters, everyone's got a new refrigerator and television, and my uncle—still dead.

“Twenty years later, the children of my father and uncle's generation—
my
generation—go off to college. These kids have been afforded more leisure time than anyone anywhere has ever had—their parents are working their tails off to send them to school to read poetry and study art. And what are the kids' responses to all that comfort and privilege? ‘Screw your System. It's broken. Nothing's right. You're all Oppressors.'”

“But what about the Civil Rights Movement?” I asked. “Those guys—”

“I'm not talking about the Civil Rights Movement! Don't mix up the kids sitting scared as hell at lunch counters and the faggots sprawled stoned on college greens. Reading and thinking and talking bullshit about human rights is not
the same thing as fighting for it. The hippies didn't get it. They joined a circus that pretended to be part of a fight. If a fight looks like a lot of fun, you should be suspicious. ‘If you ain't scared standing up for what's right, you ain't standing up for much.' Mark Twain wrote that.”

Mark Twain did not write that. I googled it as soon as I got home.

I recapped that conversation at dinner, and my dad smirked, but my mom's fork clattered to the table and she pretended to scream. “Ask Mr. Kelly if dropping napalm on civilians and sending American boys to die in the dark of Viet Cong tunnels keeps America strong and free! James, he's equating World War II and the Vietnam War. They're not the same thing.”

“I don't know. I wasn't there.” I shrugged. My dad started cracking up.

“Oh, go read about it.” My mom sighed.

Sometimes it's hard to tell if she's actually annoyed. She gets fired up about politics. “Mr. Kelly told you part of the story. Not everyone he calls a hippie was lying around stoned. A lot of them saw the Vietnam War as a betrayal of the values Mr. Kelly's
blessed
uncle”—she was becoming sarcastic—“fought to defend.”

Rex was banging his spoon against his water glass. My mom put her hand on his to still him. When I looked up, she was staring at me hard. “They were questioning whether it made sense to promote freedom and peace by dropping
bombs from the sky. And whether an economy still fueled by manufacturing missiles was an economy they wanted to be part of.”

This kind of reaction was why my brother Luke and I often called my mom “Mother Comma Esquire.” She drops into aggressive lawyer mode without warning. I'd been separating my mixed vegetables into small piles during her rant: a little pile of corn, a little pile of lima beans, a little pile of red pepper pieces. “You're going to eat all those,” my mom said, returning to her own dinner.

I ate them in four fast forkfuls and asked to be excused.

“Forget about your history paper.” My dad chuckled as I got up. “Please your mother: just lie around upstairs and smoke some pot. Be a revolutionary.”

“Go write up your interview!” my mother yelled, putting her hands over Rex's ears. Now I knew she wasn't really angry.

“I heard
pot
!” Rex hollered. “I want some pot!”

I went up to my room, leaving them to deal with their youngest son. Before I tried to decipher my scribbled interview notes and type up a coherent transcript, I found an index card and on it, in big capital letters, I preserved Mr. Kelly's advice and tacked it to the wall above my desk:

IF YOU AIN'T SCARED STANDING UP
FOR WHAT'S RIGHT,

THEN YOU AIN'T STANDING UP FOR MUCH.

—NOT MARK TWAIN

In the yellow light from the porch, I could see sleet falling, and I could hear it rattling on the deck. I don't know if it was sleet or freezing rain or what, actually, but it made me ache for summer, when my mom would be tying back tomato plants at this time in the evening, and Rex would be up in his tree in the corner of the yard. I know it's an ash tree only because he told me. We were on the driveway just after it rained last fall, and I picked up one of those winged seeds, tossed it in the air. “I love these helicopter things.”

“Samaras,” Rex corrected me.

“What?”

“They're called samaras. That one's from a maple. They fly like that so the seeds grow far from the tree. Luke told me.”

“Oh.” I picked up a smaller one. “What about this guy?”

“Ash.” He pointed to his favorite climbing tree. “Probably from Patrice Bergeron.”

“You're naming trees in the yard after Bruins players?”

“Not all of them.” He pointed to a sickly pine at the back of the yard. “I named that one after the goalie for the Flyers because Dad says he's going to chainsaw it soon.”

That kid knows more about animals and plants than anyone I know. A couple of summers ago, I was mowing the lawn, and Rex came out of the woods, barefoot and grinning, his hands cupped in front of him. I turned off the mower and bent down to see. He'd caught this tiny, shiny gray snake with a bright yellow ring around its neck and an orange belly.
“Whoa! Look at him! Where did you find that little guy?”

“Back at the old fire ring in the clearing. They like hanging out in the charcoal. Isn't that weird?”

“That is weird. Does he bite?”

“No, he's just a little ring-necked. He's wicked gentle. I want to see him eat. I'm going to catch him something.”

I stood up from my crouch. “And you're going to go put him back, right?” Rex didn't answer. He peeked between his fingers. “Remember what Luke said after the Red Eft Fiasco.” Rex had caught and imprisoned three bright orange newts without telling anyone. Luke found him crying inconsolably over their little shriveled corpses.

“Snakes like being outside, dude. You wouldn't want to be put in a glass jar, right?”

“But it'll be safe and decorated.”

“Come on. Let's go put him back. You can show me where you caught him.”

He cupped the snake against his shirt with his right hand and took my hand with his left. He doesn't do that anymore.

Sleet strafed my bedroom window. If that snake still had any slither, it would be curled way down in an old chipmunk hole somewhere. Luke says the deer and moose curl up in low spruce stands or willows when the weather's really ugly. All those creatures out there just know what to do—they don't have to figure it out. As Rex said, it's so weird.

The next day after school,
Derek and I headed to the weight room, only to find it crowded with baseball players, including Mark.

“Ohhhh!” Mark bellowed as I entered. “James! What are you doing in here? You in training for our 10K now?”

“Sure,” Derek replied for me. “We got to turn young Liddell here into one of you
real
athlete-types.”

While I spotted Derek on the bench, Mark tore into Aaron Foster for his abrupt shift in style. “What's up with that fag? Overnight he becomes a real boy? Who is he? Pinocchio?”

The younger kids on his baseball team were in hysterics.
The older guys just smirked. A year or two ago I might've joined in. What bothered me most was that Coach Williams, the baseball coach who teaches my health class, was right there, trying to fix one of the stationary bikes, and he said nothing. Maybe he wasn't listening, but the word
fag
usually gets a response from even the most dazed and weary teacher. In the locker room and gym, for some reason, the word attracts as much attention as the clang of weights.

“Mark, give him a break,” I said eventually. “That kid takes a ton of abuse. Who can blame him for wanting to fly under the radar for a while?”

“Fly under your
gay-dar
, you mean?” Mark laughed.

The sophomores and freshmen howled.

I shook my head, tried to smile, and looked over at the coach.

Nothing.

It bothered me all afternoon and evening, so after I'd finished my homework, before I went to sleep, I ended up scribbling another letter, this time to my soccer coach.

Thursday, April 14th

Dear Coach Greschner,

Thanks for agreeing to coach our indoor team. Even though we're playing only once a week, it feels good to kick the ball around, keep my touch.

One of the things that's bothering me lately is that I feel like I'm hiding on our team. I never really totally relax around
those guys. I guess I'm scared someone's going to see through me. I've thought about telling you and the rest of the team what's going on, but I'm not sure I can get the right words to come out of my mouth. The idea of talking in public about everything rattling around in my head sort of makes me want to throw up, and I'm still not totally sure I know what's true about me.

Anyway, that's it. I wish I could talk to you directly, but I don't know how you would react. Kids yell stuff in the locker room, on the bus, on the field all the time, and no one says a word to stop them. Not even you. I don't know. Maybe I'm not the only one who's thinking about all this stuff, but it sure seems that way. Thanks.

James

On Friday, I was staring blankly across the lunchroom when I spotted Aaron walking away from the serving line with a plate of pasta on his tray. He wore a light blue button-down and khakis, still playing it safe. While he was looking around, trying to find his giggly girlfriends, another boy walked past and, without even turning his head, hit the tray so that the spaghetti tipped all over Aaron. The plate clattered to the floor and every head in the lunchroom turned.

The long, low chorus of
homo
began at the baseball players' table, but then boys on the other side of the lunchroom picked it up, so it quickly sounded as though it was coming from everywhere. Aaron looked so pale that I thought he
might pass out, but instead he walked quickly out the door.

It was a shame that Aaron didn't witness what happened next. It might've made him feel a little better. A couple of teachers were all over the baseball team. They escorted four of them down to the principal's office, and kids booed at the culprits and clapped as they filed out. The booing was loud. When I got up to go find Aaron, a few senior girls were screaming at a group of freshmen sitting by the soda machines.

There's a boys' bathroom right around the corner from the cafeteria, and that's where I found Aaron. I opened the door ready to make a joke about doing laundry with paper towels and purple hand soap, but Aaron wasn't trying to clean his shirt. He had both hands braced on one of the sinks, and he gasped as though he'd been held underwater. When he turned to duck into the only toilet stall, his shirt looked as though someone had machine-gunned him across the chest.

“Aaron,” I said softly. “Aaron, hey.”

He couldn't draw a steady breath, but he managed to beg from inside the stall, “Leave me alone, please.”

“Dude, it's James Liddell.” As if that would be any comfort to him. “I'm sorry—I'm sorry that just happened.”

“Please just leave me alone,” he said again, and then added in a tight high voice, “James.”

I stood there for a little while longer, listening to him fight himself back to normal. Then I took off my sweater and
slung it over the stall's metal wall.

“Hey. Here. Take this. You're never going to get that shirt cleaned.”

No response.

I took a deep breath. “Hey, man, I know you don't want to talk right now. I don't blame you. But maybe another time, yeah?”

Still nothing, but he drew a longer, steadier breath.

“There's a party at Kevin O'Dea's tonight.” I didn't know what else to say. “Maybe I'll see you there?”

No answer.

I left.

English came two periods later. I sat in the back row that day. In the few minutes before the bell rang, most of the class huddled at the front of the room, looking at photos of Mr. Breyer's baby.

Aaron walked in, eyes still puffy and red-rimmed, but calm. He wore my green sweater. When he spotted me, he made himself smile for a second and walked over. Without saying a word, he placed a pink alligator PEZ dispenser on my desk.

“What's this?”

“Fair trade until Monday,” he explained, tugging the collar of my sweater.

“Fair trade?” I laughed. “Is this a fifty-dollar PEZ dispenser?”

“It's very dear to me. And your sacred sweater's way too big on me. And on you, actually. I'm sorry that I've waited so long to tell you. We'll switch back on Monday.”

I nodded. Kids were finding their seats. Aaron took the desk one up and across from me.

“Hey,” I whispered. “Come to that party tonight.” I wanted to be nice, but maybe I got carried away. I never saw Aaron at parties.

Breyer told us to turn to the previous night's reading.

Aaron swiveled quickly and hissed, “Where is it?”

I scribbled directions on a scrap of paper, poked Aaron with a pen, and handed the note across the aisle to him.

Then Breyer called me to the front of the room to read aloud.

As I walked into the gym after school, Mark was coming out the same door. He was shirtless, as usual, and he grabbed my arm. “Liddell! Why is Aaron Foster wearing your stuff?”

It's a plain green woolen sweater—I hadn't realized that it had become my signature look. “I gave it to him. Someone spilled spaghetti all over him.” I pretended that I hadn't seen Mark at lunch, jeering with the baseball team.

“Yeah, but”—and here Mark grimaced—“Aaron Foster? You lent your sweater to that kid? Who knows what kind of dirty it'll be when you get it back.”

“I think it'll be okay,” I muttered and tried to walk away, but Mark still gripped my arm.

“You should be careful, James.” He was talking quickly, but he sounded sincerely concerned. “You don't know what people might say.”

“Yeah, I know, dude.” I could hear Hawken's voice in my head:
He's just trying to help
. “Thanks, man.”

He slapped my butt as I passed him. “I don't work tonight,” he said, “so I'll see you guys later.”

The impressive thing about Mark is that he's had a job, at least one job, since he was eight years old. He's weeded gardens, stacked firewood, shoveled snow, cut lawns, cleaned gutters, and painted fences for years. Now he's a dishwasher and prep cook in a restaurant, and he's been trying to start a dog-walking business. Hawken took a photograph of him untangling the leashes of two Pekingese while a golden retriever mounts his leg. We're not supposed to mention that photo anymore, but it's the screensaver on Derek's laptop.

The confusing thing about Mark is that as much as he can be a moron, he can also be really funny and nice to people you'd never expect him to be friendly around. He always works the elevator for this disabled boy who's in a wheelchair. He's the only person I have ever seen helping that kid and his aide with the elevator. And in class, he makes friends with the girls sitting next to him, even if they're not popular. There's this one girl, Sam, who's pretty overweight and wears sweatshirts with puppies and horses on them, and I've seen Mark leaning in to listen to her, asking questions quietly. She seems
really happy to talk to him, and he's not up to anything, as far as I can tell. He really does know how to talk to people, how to listen to them, when he's not threatening to cripple them. I don't know why he can't be the same way around us guys more often. It's as if he thinks we're all competing to be alpha dog in a furry pack that only he believes exists.