Bad Kid (7 page)

“David,” Greg chuckled, making the room's cool air feel even colder on my exposed bottom. “You are hilarious.”

In the full-length mirror on Greg's closet door I saw myself: splayed out on the bed, legs akimbo, Greg laughing beside me. In spite of my vulnerable position, I started to laugh with him. “Nerd,” he chortled. And I swooned.

We spent that night listening to Greg's cassettes, talking about school, and fending off his intrusive brothers as they barged through the door to borrow his clothes, tapes, and CDs.

Four hours later we lay in each of the twin beds, watching TV. A film was beginning that neither of us had seen. A thin man in a nightclub crooned into the camera through a metal fence. On the dance floor, a veiled woman in sunglasses and her gaunt male partner observed the crowd, spotting a red-haired punk girl with her husky, unshaven boyfriend. At sunrise they took a limo to a very dark house, where they started flirting and stripping for each other, inexplicably still wearing sunglasses. Throughout every scene, each character smoked. There were so many smoldering cigarettes in the film that at one point, while a young David Bowie slid his hands up the leather miniskirt of a young Ann Magnuson, I thought I actually
smelled
smoke. As a thick gray cloud drifted in front of the TV, I realized it wasn't a hallucination.

“Greg!” I said, noticing him half-out his window, smoking. “What are you doing?”

“Take a chill pill. I do it all the time. Want one?”

He passed me a Marlboro Ultra Light 100 and a lighter across the threshold between our beds. I put the foreign thing in my mouth as if I'd done it a hundred times before, repeatedly trying to spark Greg's lighter to life until he impatiently ripped it from my hand. Leaning forward with the Marlboro in my mouth, I noticed the perfect musculature of his outstretched arm as he held the flame to my lips.

Don't look down. Don't look down. Don't look down
.

As the flame died in Greg's hand, I took my first drag off a cigarette, fully prepared to cough up my guts the way teenagers in movies do. But as the smoke poured down my throat as smoothly as an oyster, I knew it: I was born to do this. It wasn't the first time that something new felt instantly natural to me. Before smoking, there was disco dancing, fashion sketching, and appetizer platter arranging. But this was the first time I felt good at something that was actually
cool
. I caught my reflection in the television screen, superimposed over David Bowie's porcelain face. A cigarette looked as at-home in between my lips as it did between his.

“Want another?” Greg asked. He lit me a fresh one by holding it against the tip of the one he was already smoking; the two cigarettes crackled against each other as a mushroom cloud of smoke drifted upward.

“That's called monkey fucking,” he said, handing me the lit Marlboro.

Onscreen, Catherine Deneuve was parting her lips to release a thin trail of smoke, which drifted over her top lip and into her nose.

“I can do that. It's called a French inhale!” Greg leaned into the TV's dim light so I could see him re-create this ageless French vampire's smoking trick. My head began to spin from the nicotine as I watched the smoke move over the soft stubble on Greg's upper lip and into his flared nostril. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I shifted in my bed, worried about the flushed, warm feeling in my face and chest.

“David, you try it.”

I held the cigarette to my lips and executed the trick perfectly,
staring directly into Greg's eyes as he did the same. The two of us finished the entire pack of smokes, monkey fucking cigarette after cigarette like it was a contest. Lit only by faint moonlight and the cold glow of
The Hunger
, we could've smoked forever, like our lives depended on it.

This is Greg doing two of the things that made me love him madly.

1. Being hilarious. Note the catalog pose and fake mannequin hand in his perfectly shredded, acid-washed Guess jeans.

2. Looking perfect: the mock turtleneck, expertly gelled hair, and gold necklace. Half our freshman class wore crucifixes as the Madonna-stained eighties continued to linger into the front end of nineties fashion. But no one at our school wore their faux expressions of religious faith quite as well as Greg did.

G
reg and I spent almost every waking moment together that summer. By then he'd ditched his girlfriend. During the day, we'd hang out in the neighborhood with Greg's little group of great-smelling buddies, who were all easygoing and kind. There was Billy, a slightly overweight boy with freckles who was always making dumb faces and loved playing Pac-Man for hours at a time. There was also Phil, a skinny blond boy who lived on the next block and dated a different girl every week. And then there was Joe, a lanky basketball player with black hair and blue eyes who listened to heavy metal.

I didn't have to work too hard in their presence because they were all such loudmouth buffoons. I could sit in a room listening to them riff on
Beavis and Butt-head
for an hour and not say a thing. They weren't just entertaining; they were also the first group of males I had felt comfortable around in a long time. But
none of them made me feel quite like Greg did. As we got closer, it became harder for me to be away from him for more than twenty-four hours at a time.

“You're staying over at Greg's again, honey?” asked my mom, rouging her cheeks in the bathroom mirror.

“Um, yeah, if it's okay?”

“Of course it is!” she said, patting my cheek. “This is your summer!” My mom had been staying at Mike's often, when she wasn't working. The summer was giving her the chance to experience a bit of romance before I went back to school. It was also giving me the chance to form a new friendship. “It sounds like a great environment over there, honey.”

Although it wasn't a
bad
environment, Greg and I weren't exactly eating balanced meals, trading baseball cards, and going to bed by ten. Our days with the boys were pretty traditional: video games, movie theaters, and MTV. But our evenings were different, and they belonged solely to us. Every night we'd stay up late smoking cigarettes and drinking gallons of coffee. We'd rewatch
The Hunger
and talk about witchcraft, flipping through my mom's big purple
Book of Spells
, which lived under Greg's bed now. We'd try to figure out how to sneak into over-eighteen clubs and get our hands on this elusive “marijuana.”

“Greg's a nice boy from a big, stable family with two parents at home,” added my mother as she brushed her hair. “They say that kind of familial bonding can be very good for adolescents from single-parent homes.”

I rolled my eyes, imagining which
Is-My-Child-a-Serial-Killer
book my mother had gleaned this information from. “Yeah, you don't want me out there torturing cats.”

“Oh hush, you,” she yelped, smacking my arm with a hairbrush.

Later that night, after a long day playing video games at Billy's, Greg and I were prepping for our favorite activity: the Ouija board.

Around 8 p.m. we snuck through his house, gathering every candle we could find. We lit each one, until the bedroom was glowing with flickering orange light. Greg delicately placed the Ouija board on the floor between us. Sitting Indian-style across from me, he closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.

“Okay, David. Are you ready?”

“I'm ready,” I responded, shutting my eyes and lowering my hands onto the little plastic pointer.

Greg asked the spirits all kinds of questions: about our futures, our friends, how we'd die, who we'd been in past lives. He truly believed in the power of the Ouija board and would heed its advice, taking notes in a small journal he hid in the frame of his bed. I watched him write; he bit his lip adorably as he looked at the ceiling to organize his thoughts. Everything in me wanted to scream out,
You are the coolest, most handsome person I've ever met and if you'd just kiss me one time I swear I'd leave you alone forever
.

“Greg, do you think that . . .”

“Oh my God,” he interrupted, wide-eyed. “It's Sunday night!”

We turned on the TV just in time for MTV's
120 Minutes
, a weekly show featuring two hours of our favorite music videos from the newly coined “alternative” genre. That summer we discovered bands like the Cure, Depeche Mode, Bauhaus, and New Order, in music videos featuring dark forests, fog machines,
and oodles of black. We listened to an endless rotation of moody British male singers moaning seductively about how sad they were, or sadly about how horny they were, as Greg writhed around his room, dancing. The longer we'd been friends, the more he'd taken to performing outright routines for me.

“David! What do you think?” he asked, slowly swaying forward as he touched his right heel to his left toe on the floor. “Doesn't this look cool?”

“Yeah. It's like you're walking on an invisible line or something.”

“Oh my God, David. You're right. I should call this the Tightrope.”

“Whatever, private dancer,” I said, rolling my eyes.

In truth, I could've watched Greg dance for hours as he spun in circles and pointed skyward. I sang along and thumbtacked different cardboard CD sleeves like makeshift posters to the wall over my bed. And by that point I was really starting to think of it as
my
bed. In
my
room. In
my
house.

Our nights together were a separate thing from our days with the boys, like a secret. Neither of us elaborated on this in words, but a part of me knew that Greg's dance numbers were strictly for us, for me; and I loved it. Slowly, we saw less and less of Billy, Phil, and Joe. Even the days became our own, and by August we weren't hanging out with them at all.

One morning a few weeks before our sophomore year would start, Greg and I walked to the mall. We liked going just as the shops were opening, when elderly folks wearing ankle weights did their early-morning laps around the building's perimeter. Greg and I went straight to the Music Express CD's & Cassettes
with our little list of songs we'd heard on
120 Minutes
. After buying as many CDs as we could afford, we set up camp in the food court with our gray Discmans with the orange buttons, excited to listen to our new tunes.

“What's this one?” Greg asked, popping my Pet Shop Boys
Introspective
CD into his Discman. He flipped around the right ear pad of his huge Koss headphones so I could listen too as the opening track, “Left to My Own Devices,” began.

We stopped chewing our Chick-fil-A nuggets and froze, immediately transported by the lush, ethereal sound of a full orchestra and dramatic synth hits. A clearly homosexual British man began singing about being “a lonely boy, no strength, no joy / in a world of my own at the back of the garden.”

I wanted to scream,
Greg, he's singing about me!

To be fair, we didn't really have “gardens” in Texas. We had flat, dried-out yards full of burnt yellow grass and stray cat shit. But the music made me feel like I could be anywhere. As the synths and drums built, the vocalist began singing about Che Guevara and Debussy. I didn't know who Che Guevara and Debussy were, but I wanted to. The album continued like a satellite course at Euro-Gay University as Neil Tennant sang about impressionist art, the Russian Revolution, and more British landmarks than you could shake a bag of crisps at.

“They're amazing,” gasped Greg, his lips covered in honey-mustard dipping sauce. I considered Greg's love of Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, and Catherine Deneuve. I liked all those things, and I was gay. So, mathematically, shouldn't Greg's appreciation of them make
him
gay too?

I reached over the table with a napkin to wipe his mouth, saying, “Greg, you've got . . .”

“What are you doing?” he snapped, pushing my hand away.

“Oh. Sorry . . . your mouth,” I said. “Sorry . . . Sorry . . . I . . .”

“Fuck you, slut!” someone screamed as a flock of birds scattered along the atrium roof.

We looked toward Long John Silver's, where the girl's scream came from. Clustered around a mountain of Taco Bell wrappers and tipped-over thirty-two-ounce cups was a group of kids wearing black clothes and heavy boots. They threw ice and flipped each other off with black-varnished fingers, cackling and yelling at each other with painted lips.

“Who are they?” Greg whispered as a boy in black lipstick noticed us watching. I quickly looked up, pretending to admire the skylights of the mall ceiling, half a chicken nugget hanging from my mouth. These were surely the cult kids we'd heard about on the ten o'clock news, the ones who murdered stray cats on chalk-drawn pentagrams in the park. Or maybe they were vampires who'd realized that covering themselves in a quarter-inch of foundation would protect them from the sun—vampires who, after thousands of years toiling in darkness, had discovered the secret to existing in daylight and said, “Yes! Finally, we've done it! Now we can go to the MALL!”

We watched them for an hour, slyly catching glances as we showed off our brand-new Cure, Bauhaus, and Church CDs.

“Look at that girl in the center,” I murmured, noticing a girl in the eye of the goth storm, sitting perfectly still. She was small and Hispanic; her burgundy-tipped ebony hair swept up from the back of her neck and over the top of her head, forming a curtain of strands over her face. Through the chin-length strands we could occasionally see one of her
black-framed eyes, peering intensely around her. She was the queen bee of the group, never getting up as drone goths brought her giant Mountain Dews and fresh packs of Camel filterless cigarettes.

“David,” Greg whispered in the bustling food court, as if we were in class. “Look at her face . . . When she moves again. Wait a minute. Look right . . . right . . . right . . . NOW!”

As she leaned over to speak to someone, her crusty bangs momentarily moved away from her face. What I saw looked so strange that I didn't quite process what it was at first.

“Greg, does she have a fake nose?”

At one point it might have been flesh-colored, but now it looked ashy and grayish, which made it seem askew on her face.

Two hours later, the goth crew started to gather their things to leave.

“Greg, they're coming this way,” I whispered, opening the CD booklet for my Love and Rockets album and holding it near my face to be seen. As they shuffled past, their crooked-nosed leader stopped to tie one of her twelve-hole Doc Marten boots a few feet from our table. Slowly she stood up, staring at me through her veil of fried black bangs.

“Hey,” she said. Greg and I looked up at her. “That's an excellent album,” she sighed, then stared at us in silence. After what felt like a muted eternity, a boy in a Depeche Mode t-shirt ahead of her yelled “Daphne!,” a name that seemed totally at odds with her witchy persona.

“See ya,” she said, shooting us a good-bye sneer before shuffling away.

“David!” Greg exclaimed, grabbing my arm. “She liked your CD!”

“I know!” I shrieked back, my excitement amplified by Greg's skin on mine.

We didn't have the guts to say anything to her. But soon we'd have to muster the courage. Because we'd just met a legend, a rare bird, a unicorn.