A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (31 page)

“Our parents got it for him when we were little,” Ethan said. “I got a violin. It's downstairs. Smaller, but worth about as much money.”

“How much is that?” I couldn't stop myself from asking.

“Now? Fifteen thousand. About.”

“So that's worth $7,500?” I asked, pointing at the piano and thinking about the fact that my dad and I got something like $4,000 a year in welfare.

“No,” Ethan said, looking annoyed. “Fifteen thousand each.”

“I love this thing,” Kyle said, sitting down and opening the fallboard that covered the keys. He started to play a few Joplin tunes that I recognized from elementary school music classes, blending one effortlessly into the next. I suddenly felt very much out of my depth. I'd never met anyone my own age who could play an instrument, let alone just sit down and start improvising.

“How … does one come to … buy a piano?” I asked Ethan.

“You mean how did we find it?” Ethan asked.

“No,” I said, trying to figure out how to phrase the question. “I just mean—I don't think I've ever seen one in someone's house before.”

Kyle glanced up from where he was playing and gave me a very different kind of smile from the goofy, affable one he'd been showing me all day. It gave me the idea that I'd just stepped in something.

Ethan cocked his head like a confused cocker spaniel, but Brandon, who was assembling sandwiches in the kitchen, answered the question I was trying to ask.

“Our dad's business partner ripped him off,” he said. “We used to live up north, by Montlake. Big house. Big yard. Tennis courts. Fountain out front. Dad had to sell all that off to cover the losses from the business partner thing, but Mom insisted we keep the piano and the violin. When all the dust cleared, Dad had just enough money left for one investment. So he bought this place to fix it up and resell it. The plan is that he'll use the profits to buy two places, fix those up and resell them. And so on.”

“What was your dad's business?” I asked. “Before?”

“Investment banker,” Ethan offered.

I'd never heard that answer to that question before. I wasn't even sure what it meant. I decided to change the subject.

“How long have you been working on the house?” I asked.

“Two years,” Brandon said.

“You should have seen it when we bought it,” Ethan said. “The family that lived here had been here pretty much since it was built, but they went broke twenty years ago. Then they just sat in here and went crazy. They had so many cats in the basement that the cat pee leaked into the foundation and disintegrated the concrete. The whole house was listing. We had to jack it up and repour the foundation. That was twenty grand right there. For cat pee.”

Brandon nodded. “Rotten books and magazines in all the rooms, rats everywhere in spite of the cats. Old clothes, rotten food. It was disgusting.”

I looked around at the bare, unfinished floors and the exposed wiring.

“So it's better now,” I said.

Brandon made a “so-so” gesture with his hand.

 

48

I caught my school bus on the corner of Broadway and Republican Street at seven o'clock in the morning. Broadway was the Seattle equivalent of San Francisco's Castro, or New York's Fire Island; it was the center of the city's gay community. But at seven on a weekday morning it was mostly just cold, wet, and empty. I stood on the corner for five or ten awkward minutes, next to the Fred Meyer where I used to buy my action figures. A few more teens came from down the hill: A tall older guy with big features and light brown, wavy hair. Denim jacket, jeans and sneakers, all well broken in. A compact, dark-haired kid about my age, with weirdly pale skin and new clothes—new jeans, new shoes, new jacket. Looked like a vampire, for some reason. Then Brandon and Ethan. I was glad to see some familiar faces, but they didn't go out of their way to be friendly and I didn't push it.

When the big yellow school bus finally came along and stopped for us, I got on and sat near the front. Brandon and Ethan sat farther back. The smell of the green vinyl seats was strong enough to make my head spin. I tried to breathe through my mouth and not to make eye contact with anyone.

Getting off the bus and walking into the school was completely disorienting. A lot of the “kids” looked like adults to me, and the halls were packed solid with them. It was impossible to move without bumping into someone. I'd looked at a mimeographed map of the school the night before to figure out where my classes were, but the reality was just overwhelming.

I found my way to my first period World History class and stepped gratefully out of the crush of people moving through the hall. The layout of the classroom was similar to the classes in my school in Ballard, with desks for about thirty students, all facing a teacher's desk and the blackboard behind it at the front of the room. The students' desks were different than they had been in elementary school. In Ballard, the desks had flip tops, so we could store our supplies and books in them. Here, the desks were simple plastic chairs with wood writing surfaces attached and a small wire rack underneath the seat. The rack was ostensibly for storing books, but it was too small to put things on and it divided the space under the seat so I wouldn't be able to fit my backpack down there—which would mean I'd have to put my gear in the aisle.

That would be no small thing. I'd been told when I registered that all the lockers were taken, so I was going to have to carry all my textbooks in the blue nylon backpack my dad had used for community college back in Eugene.

The room itself was comfortingly old—light-colored hardwood floors, plaster-and-lath walls under thick layers of dark purple paint, wood trim, built-in wooden supply cabinets with leaded glass windows, and the blackboard set in an age-darkened wooden frame. The school colors were purple and white, so every wall in the place was painted various mismatched shades of purple.

The desk at the front of the room was made of battle-scarred oak, with an oak swivel chair parked behind it. The room had fifteen-foot ceilings, with banks of fluorescent lights dangling down on steel cables.

There was no teacher at the desk, so I picked out the first white kid I saw who wasn't involved in a conversation. Some Ballard-style headbanger in a denim jacket, with a mullet.

“Is there assigned seating?” I asked.

“What?” He frowned at me.

“Is there assigned seating?” I asked again. “I'm new. Can I just sit anywhere, or is there assigned seating?”

“I don't know, man.”

Yeah, okay, I thought. It's going to be that kind of day.

I picked an empty seat at random and sat down in it. Sure enough, a few minutes later, a girl in a tight pink sweater walked in, scowled at me, and said, “You're in my seat.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Is there an empty seat?”

“I don't know,” she said. “But that's my seat.”

“Screw it,” I muttered. I felt too conspicuous standing at the front of the class, so I sat in the teacher's chair and watched the room fill up.

A minute after the bell rang a harried-looking woman in her mid-thirties came in, clutching a giant stack of books and folders. She had black plastic glasses with enormous frames, and short-cropped curly dark brown hair. She was wearing a sweater vest over a blouse, and wool slacks.

“Ms. Gibson?” I asked. “I'm Jason. I'm new. I'm supposed to get your signature on my registration form and ask you for a textbook.”

She looked at me and blinked owlishly.

“You're in my seat,” she said.

*   *   *

The rest of the day went pretty much like the first part of it had. I had swimming for second period, which I'd chosen because it seemed less awful than regular physical education. After first period I asked someone at random where the swimming pool was. It wasn't on the map I'd been looking at the night before.

“It's on the fourth floor,” the kid said.

“The…? I didn't think there was a fourth floor.”

“You've gotta take the elevator,” he said.

“Where's that?”

“End of that hall,” he said, pointing.

I went where he'd directed me, but when I found the elevator it had a key lock.

“Hey,” I said to a guy who was standing by the corner watching other kids go by. “How do I work this?”

“You don't,” he said. “It's only for crippled kids.”

“Then how'm I supposed to get to the fourth floor?”

“There is no fourth floor,” he said.

“That's what I thought,” I said. “But where's the pool?”

“Oh,” he said. “The fourth floor pool gag. Sorry, man, someone was fucking with you. The pool's outside the building, down the hill. Big concrete thing. Looks like a bomb shelter.”

“Which way?” I asked.

“That way,” he said, pointing toward the north end of the school. “Out the doors, down the stairs. You can't miss it.”

I didn't entirely believe him, but I asked a few other people and got the same story. The pool was half a block north of the main building, in an underground building that looked like a giant concrete bunker. When I found my way inside, I located the teacher, Mr. Ryerson, a hugely overweight white guy in his early sixties with a well-oiled pompadour, a broad, jowly face, and a bulbous nose. He was wearing nylon trunks under a bulky sweatshirt, but he didn't look like he'd been in the water since he destroyed the
Pequod
and dragged Ahab screaming into the depths. I gave him my registration form to sign and asked him where I was supposed to get shorts.

“You don't have any swimming trunks with you?” he growled.

“Uh,” I said, “I thought I'd get them here. Like a textbook or something?”

His expression said he thought I must be joking. In a bad way.

“Christ, Schmidt,” he said, pointing to the bleachers that overlooked the pool. “You can sit it out today. Tomorrow, bring some goddamn shorts.”

*   *   *

Finding the cafeteria for lunch, at least, was no problem. It was a large room located on the first floor. We ate in two shifts, and it looked to me like a pretty significant number of kids ate off campus. Anyone was allowed to leave school grounds for lunch, but I didn't have money for restaurant food. A full lunch in the cafeteria was a buck ten, and milk was a quarter. I qualified for the free lunch program automatically, because my dad and I were still on welfare, but I'd learned in elementary school that using a free lunch card was more trouble than it was worth. Students on the regular meal program got a blue card. Free lunch kids got a pink card; anyone saw that pink card, it was nonstop bullshit for the rest of the year.

As I walked down the stairs to the cafeteria I passed some guys sitting at the base of the stairs. They were laughing and telling jokes, and one of them was doing … I didn't know what the hell he was doing. I'd never seen anything like it. He had his hand cupped over his mouth, and he seemed to be spitting into it. And hissing. And then making some kind of other weird noise. As I got closer I realized he was making a pretty consistent rhythm, like a cheap synthesizer. Suddenly we made eye contact and he stopped and pointed at me and started laughing.

“Man,” he said. “Check that dude out!”

He looked at his friends and opened his eyes wide, then mimed staring at something that was going past, like some slack-jawed rube seeing his first horseless carriage. My face got hot and I stormed past him while he and his friends laughed at me.

*   *   *

When the day finally ended I went out the south doors of the school and found bus #320 parked with a dozen or so others. I sat down in the front-most seat, across the aisle from the driver, and felt the tension oozing out of my body. I'd survived. And more than that, I'd been vindicated. After the isolation of San Diego, the feeling of being packed into that enormous building with so many other students was like staggering onto land after a shipwreck. Making friends was almost secondary. All day, I had to talk to people, negotiate with people, listen to them, and be listened to by them. All different kinds of people. If four years in that place didn't pound me into some semblance of normalcy, nothing would.

 

49

I had one sheet of paper where I kept all my phone numbers. They were written in a dozen different kinds of pen, the sheet folded and unfolded so many times there were holes where the creases intersected. Eventually I sat down with the telephone in my room and put my sheet of paper in front of me.

I'd always had an extremely active imagination. In San Diego a lot of my imagining had been about my friends in Seattle. I played out scenarios in my head where I'd visit or move back, and they'd be really glad to see me. There'd be some kind of party. Hearty handshakes and welcome homes. And we'd do things. Better things than we'd done before. Water parks and movies. All-night Dungeons & Dragons marathons. Acrobatics. In my mind, getting to play with other kids again would feel like doing backflips. Like breaking free of gravity.

My problem—or one of my problems—was that even I couldn't delude myself into thinking anyone besides Eddie would be glad to see me again. Sitting in my bedroom, looking at my phone list, I knew I had to internalize the idea that calling the guys I'd known in Ballard wasn't going to be a good experience. There was no question of not doing it. In spite of having met and hung out with Ethan and Brandon, precedent suggested that I shouldn't assume I was going to make even a single friend in my new neighborhood or my new school. So it was this or nothing. But the trick I'd only recently learned was that expecting things to suck—really convincing myself ahead of time that everything was going to suck big dirty ass—significantly reduced the sting when the reality lived up to my worst expectations. So there'd be no party. There'd be no water park. Most of them probably wouldn't be happy to hear from me.