Bad Kid (8 page)

S
on, we need to talk,” he said.

There was no reason for my dad to be waiting for me in the parking spot in front of my mom's apartment building after school. He wasn't even supposed to be back in town for another four days. My sophomore year had only started a couple weeks earlier; it hadn't even yielded a report card yet. My mind raced as I wondered what I could be in trouble for. Had my mom found my folder of Antonio Sabàto Jr. clippings from Calvin Klein underwear ads? Had she shown my dad the fantasy writings about Greg, Marky Mark, and the rookie cop from
T. J. Hooker
in my journal? What about the VHS tape full of Mark-Paul Gosselaar's shirtless scenes from
Saved by the Bell
?

My dad stood up from the curb and peered at me over his sunglasses.

“Well?” he asked.

“What?” I said, trying to sound casual.

“Whaddya think?” he asked, grinning from ear to ear and gesturing to the car parked beside him. “I got you some new wheels, DJ!”

“Oh. Um . . .” I looked at the boxy, baby-blue sedan, the car of a low-paid nurse saving for retirement or of one of the old nuns who shopped for yarn at String City in the mall. “What is it?” I asked, trying to muster some excitement for his subpar gift. “An Escort?”

“No, son, but it's very similar. It's a Mercury Lynx.”

“What about the Bronco II or the old Karmann Ghia I liked?”

“Well, I did some research, son.” My father rounded the car excitedly with a yellow legal pad. “See here?” he said, pulling a pen from his shirt pocket and pointing to his data. “Bronco IIs tip over like clockwork. And they don't even make parts for the other one anymore.”

As he rambled statistics, I inspected the car, imagining Greg's ridicule once he saw it. I leaned inside to see the navy-blue interior and slightly cracked plastic dashboard.

“It's lightly used,” said my dad jovially, “but it gets great mileage and will last for years and years, maybe even into college.”

The nightmare of driving this car for four years worsened once I looked between the seats. “You got me a standard?” I screeched. “A standard? Why would you do that?”

“Now calm down, DJ.” My dad rambled through a prepared list of cost-benefit analyses and safety features intended to offset my darkest fear coming true: having to drive a stick shift. For two months we'd sat in grocery-store parking lots and open fields, bucking back and forth in my attempts to drive his stick-shift truck.

“But I can't drive this!” I pleaded, no longer concerned with seeming thankful. “Please!”

“David, calm down.” My dad put his hands on his hips and tightened his jaw.

“But I drive Mom's automatic just fine,” I whined. “Why did you . . .”

“This is your new car, dammit!” he screamed. “You can let it sit here and rot for all I care. But this is what I was charitable enough to buy for you!”

We barely spoke to each other that night over dinner at Bill Miller Bar-B-Q. I chewed my brisket angrily in silence, too immature to realize how lucky I was to have a car at all, let alone a free one.

I mustered a bitter “Thanks” when he dropped me off in front of my apartment an hour later. As he pulled away, my mother came outside with her boyfriend, Mike.

“You got yourself a car, huh?” he said, noticing the keys in my hand. Mike was a tall, woolly man with a thick beard. He spoke in a laid-back drawl acquired from being born and raised in Seguin, Texas, a small town known for being home to the biggest pecan in the world.

“Oh, honey,” my mother sighed, looking at my powder-blue boat. “So
this
is it, huh?”

“Yep,” I answered, clutching the keys in my hand so hard I almost drew blood.

“Well, it could be worse, right?” Mike asked with a grin.

“How?” I asked, half-sarcastic, half-hoping for a real answer.

“It could be purple or orange!” my mom exclaimed. “This is actually your mother's favorite color!” She smiled, not knowing she'd just made it so much worse.

“Get in and see how it feels!” said Mike, opening the driver's-side door.

As my mom and I sat down in the front seats, she reminded me, “A lot of sixteen-year-olds don't get a free car, honey. Look on the bright side.”

I gripped the steering wheel and settled into the cushy seat. I started to feel better, reminding myself that I finally had my own set of wheels. This positive attitude ended after a moment, as my mother reached to where the tape player should have been.

“Huh?” she queried. “It only has radio?”

I could feel my blood begin to boil on either side of my face. My ears felt hot and my jaw clenched. I was a sixteen-year-old with a car that had no ability to play cassettes or CDs. What was the point of living?

By the end of September, the stereo had proved to be the least of my worries. It was the stick shift that almost did me in.

“We're going to die!” screamed Greg as cars from three directions slammed on their brakes. At the I-410/Perrin Beitel Road intersection I'd gotten stuck while pulling away from a green light. Car horns honked as I turned the key again and again, attempting to start the pastel beast but stalling it every time.

“David! Start the fucking car!” yelled Greg as we bucked forward another few feet. An obese cowboy with a holstered gun stomped toward us, his black truck at a standstill, like twenty others all around us.

“What the fuck is wrong with you, boy?” he yelled, pounding on my windshield.

“He's going to kill us!” yelped Greg, recoiling from the looming giant. “Hurry!”

“I'm trying, Greg! I'm trying!”

After a dozen attempts, I finally released and pressed the clutch and accelerator with perfect timing, sailing forward like a rocket beneath the freeway and through two red lights.

“You're going to crash!” yelled Greg. His flair for the dramatic had been intensifying during the first few weeks of sophomore year, as he'd become more obsessed with our theater arts class. “We're going to die!”

To be fair, I was going to crash. And we did almost die, a few times.

“Pull over, nerd!” Greg demanded. “I'm driving.”

For fear of perishing with me behind the wheel, Greg had been driving my car to school a lot. I picked him up each morning with a veneer of sweat on my forehead from the ten times I'd almost flown off an access ramp. But oftentimes, my mom would let me stay over at Greg's, especially on Sundays, which extended the weekend for both of us—she in Seguin with Mike, and I in San Antonio with Greg.

“I just love that you have a new friend,” she said. “And from a great family!”

I neglected to tell my mom that Greg's giant bedroom window was easy to sneak out of. I also neglected to tell her that Greg's parents slept in a very secluded room at the back of the house and rarely laid eyes on me. I might also have neglected to tell her about our 2 a.m. walks to Stop & Shop for packs of cigarettes, which would be completely depleted by sunrise.

Every school morning we woke up extra-early, after a three-hour nap, to brew coffee and get our looks together. Greg introduced me to a whole new world of hair products, which added fifteen minutes to my daily process. Side by side
in the bathroom, we gelled and moussed our hair into a dozen styles before settling on one. Around 7:30 his brothers would groggily stumble from their bedrooms to find us perfectly dressed, styled, and caffeinated. On the way to Taco Cabana for breakfast burritos we'd smoke a cigarette and watch the sun come up. Then we'd smoke another cigarette and stop at 7-Eleven for more coffee. After another cigarette we'd arrive at school, bucking and rocking into the parking lot in my hideous blue tank.

A few days before Halloween we arrived at school in our usual morning trance, still buzzing from nicotine. I walked into the courtyard wearing acid-washed Guess jeans and a New Order shirt, both borrowed from Greg's closet, which was really
our
closet, in
our
room, in
our
house.

“Hey Greg,” said Lisette, a perky, big-haired blonde we called a “Bowhead,” a girl whose big, ribboned headband made her head look like an ornate Christmas present. “Hi David,” she mumbled plainly in my direction, only because I was standing beside Greg.

“What's up, Lisette?” Greg answered her and slid his Ray-Bans down his nose, looking like Tom Cruise in a movie poster.

“What did you do this weekend?” she asked, batting her eyelashes as she fluffed her new, poodlelike bob.

“Not much. We just hung out at the mall and went swimming at my house,” Greg answered Lisette in his bored lower register as she twisted a clump of crimped hair around her finger. Occasionally she glared my way as if to say, “You're
still
here?”

“I got a joke, Greg!” she said, hugging her Dooney & Bourke shoulder bag. “What's red and bubbly and scratches at the window?”

“What?” he asked mock-excitedly, knowing the punch line perfectly well.

“A baby in a microwave!” squealed Lisette, leaning against him as she giggled.

I almost felt bad, watching her bask in Greg's charitable fake laughter. I knew the sound of Greg's real laughter. She probably never would. As we watched her massive crimped bouffant bounce away from us, I whispered out the side of my mouth, “When did her head become a dust mop?”

Greg dropped his books and slowly slid against my shoulder to the ground, roaring with laughter until he was on all fours. I reached down to help him up but was pulled down as well.

“You asshole,” I chuckled beside him as papers and pens spilled from my backpack. Students in the courtyard looked at us like we were weirdos, rolling around on the concrete, crying with laughter. Being perceived as a weirdo was an experience I'd thought I wanted behind me. But lying in the courtyard beside Greg, staring up at the sun, delirious from barely two hours of sleep, it felt okay. As long as I had Greg, I didn't care what people thought of me.

A few weeks later we went to the mall on Black Friday, which was a mob scene and made for some great people watching. We hadn't noticed the goth crew in the food court for a while. But after an absence they'd returned with their leader, in all her purple-haired, prosthetic-nosed glory. Greg and I were fifteen minutes into watching the freak camp when we heard a familiar nasal squall.

“Greg!” Lisette giggled from across the food court. Her massive hair bounced in time with a dozen shopping bags as her Bowhead posse approached us.

“Ugh,” Greg sighed, ripping the tag off his new Erasure T-shirt.

As the Bowheads neared the freaks, Lisette noticed Daphne putting a cigarette out in a cup of honey-mustard sauce.

“Ewww,” Lisette cackled, pointing the freaks out to her friends. “Smoking is so gross!”

Seemingly unfazed, Daphne stood up in front of the group and swept her hair back from her face, revealing a terrifying moonscape of foundation-caked acne. She locked eyes with Lisette as the Bowheads stopped laughing and froze. Daphne let out a shrill scream and ripped away her prosthetic nose, exposing a wet cavity of soft pink tissue that throbbed and flexed with each sirenlike wail.

The Bowheads attempted to escape all at once, tripping one another as woven leather belts and stonewashed shorts spilled from their shopping bags. Scrambling to get up or crawl away, they stepped on each other's fingers and fell over each other's legs. Their screams sounded like the ones you hear in recorded 911 calls. One by one, they ran toward the Macy's entrance as Daphne shuffled forward like a zombie. Lisette finally regained her footing and ran the length of the second-floor balcony, yelling until she was out of sight.

A hundred shoppers looked on in horror, afraid to approach or reprimand the deformed girl in the Nosferatu T-shirt. In their wake, the Bowheads had left a small pile of shopping bags and scattered beads from one of their broken necklaces. Daphne hunched over the mess and made a great snorting sound as she plugged the false nose back onto her face. Two friends joined her and they picked every last bead off the tiled floor, even stopping an oncoming shopper with a stroller.

“Careful, lady!” Daphne warned, picking up the remnants of jewelry.

As Daphne sat back down with the freaks to model some of the abandoned clothes, Greg leaned into my ear and whispered, “Who wouldn't want to be friends with them?”

We had to infiltrate their lair.

On the way home Greg played our favorite Book of Love cassette from the boom box in his lap as we jerked away from stop-lights, causing melees at every intersection. Pulling up to Greg's house as he ejected the tape, we noticed something strange in the driveway. Right behind Johnny, who was doing power push-ups in a pair of tiny onionskin shorts, was a bright-red convertible Cabriolet.

“Surprise!” yelled Georgia as we walked up the driveway. “Christmas is early!”

Greg screamed with delight. “Get in, David!” he yelled, jumping into the driver's seat. I sat down beside him in the beautiful beige interior and relished the rich leather smell of brand-new seats.

“Look! A real stereo!” Greg yelled, pointing to the removable-front tape deck.

“And I installed a CD changer in the back,” said Johnny, dripping sweat over me as he reached in to pop the trunk. “You can load it with a dozen discs. It's fuckin' awesome.”

“David,” Greg exclaimed, “we can listen to music the normal way now!”

“Yeah, normal,” I repeated, noticing the automatic transmission stick between us.

“Now you both have cars!” smiled Georgia, momentarily staring across the street at my ugly, azure death trap. In the rearview
mirror it looked so decrepit—boxy and boring, with a thin layer of midautumn Texas pollen covering its sides.

Georgia kissed Greg's cheek and went inside as Johnny excitedly told Greg all about the Cabriolet, a car that felt more like the one I should be driving but that I knew was so much more expensive than anything my family could afford.