Choir Boy (12 page)

Gray seemed determined to finish Berry’s “life assessment” before he picked on some other loser. “So hey, what kinds of careers could our special guy aim for with such a great list?”

A voice from the back of the class piped in: “The exciting world of toilet-bowl cleanser.”

Gray shouted over the laughter. “Hey, come on. That’s not funny, guys. I mean, there are as many exciting careers out there as there are people in this room. How about tech support? Or teaching?” More laughter. Berry had already stood and walked halfway to the door. It was nearly time to turn into a Goose anyway.

Berry hung around the hallway and stared at anti-drug posters for half an hour or so. Their smudgy black-and-white photographs of wan faces gave drugs a fascinating glamour. School made Berry feel as though he’d taken some not very good drugs. He had all the attention-sapping side effects, but without any happy brain fur.

The bell rang. Berry was just about to head for lunch when Gray Redman tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, kid. I’m really sorry about the career thing. Listen, here’s my card. You need any motivational counseling or anything, give me a call, okay?”

Berry nodded. He shoved the card—gray with red letters—into a jeans pocket. “Thanks, I guess. I already know what I want to do, and that’s be a choirboy.” Berry waited for Gray to laugh at him.

“Are you a choirboy now?” Gray asked instead.

“St. Luke’s,” Berry said.

“You may not be able to keep doing that forever, and it’s hard to feed a family on choirboy wages. But, hey, maybe if you figure out what you like about choirboying, you can look for that in another job.”

“I like the radiance.” Berry wished people would stop telling him he couldn’t do what he did forever. “I don’t worry about anything when I sing in church.”

Gray smiled and patted Berry on the shoulder.

Berry ate lunch alone. The kids from Swan class watched him and laughed. His fifteen words had obviously become a major topic. Berry had attracted ridicule and sometimes violence before. But this was different. His stomach sank to the root of his still-sore testicles. Berry sensed a turning point.

The other choirboys at Orlac didn’t exactly let the choirboy relationships carry over at school. Randy had once stopped a bunch of Geese who were beating Berry—after they’d already bruised a few ribs and knocked the breath out of him, but before they got around to dislodging teeth or cracking fingers—on the grounds that he’d had enough.

That’s not to say Berry had no friends in the Geese classroom. He did sometimes chat with Marc from choir, and Zawa, a boy who was deaf in one ear and invented clothing out of paper, cloth, and scrap metal, would pass Berry halfnonsense notes. And some others acted friendly on occasion. Junior High social life seethed with uncertainty. Someone might be friendly one week, neutral the next, and hostile a week after that.

“Hey, how was your career thing?” Marc acted surprisingly friendly. “I found out I could be a food service worker or self-destructive gambler. Randy could be a bus or taxi driver.”

“That’s great,” Berry said. “I wasn’t sure what they ended up deciding for me. I think it’s a mystery.”

“I’m going to be a metal bird,” Zawa scribbled on a notebook page.

The adulthood double-whammy of careers and Sex Ed had the Geese acting more like kids, clowning and tussling. Randy used another kid’s butt to erase the blackboard, holding him by his belt. Berry found a seat in the magic middle but close to the window.

The other theme of the day seemed to be Teachers’ Day Off. Toad introduced two volunteers from the Sex Ed Council, a local non-profit, and practically sprinted for her break room.

A tall, skinny guy in a too-small sports jacket, tie, and jeans talked about diseases, while his colleague, a short, round woman with curly hair, listened. “Insanity, heart problems, brain damage, and death. Sure, gonorrhea is treatable if you catch it in time—just look out for a foul discharge from your opening—but a lot of people don’t know if they have it until it’s too late. And then there’s chlamydia. Chances are somebody in this room will have it in the next few years.”

Berry liked diseases and gruesome stories of limbs that rotted off or brains that failed. But the Sex Ed man’s disease talk was too boring, it was all pill bottle stuff: side effects and symptoms in dry words. Berry imagined a voice like the stentorian tenor from the start of “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” by Bairstow intoning that a plague of genital warts came upon the people and they wailed in the depths of despair and the Lord said unto them: “True Love Waits.” The woman was better than the man. For one thing, she was kind of cute—she had Maura’s sensuality, but without the live-wire energy. “Abstain doesn’t just mean a spot on your stomach,” she said. “It’s a way of life.” Nobody laughed at the “ab stain” pun. She talked for a while about ways to say “no,” because you respect yourself too much, or because virginity is not just the potential for something else, but a promise in itself.

The last bell approached and Berry heard laughter in the halls, the machinery of clean young violence clattering to life. Berry felt needles stab his gut. He suddenly knew he wouldn’t get away from school without serious beating. What if Brandon and some other Swans just wanted to crack some of his ribs, but then they found his breasts? What if his pills fell out of his backpack? Berry pictured his neck snapping against Brandon’s quarterback knee.

He jumped up before the last bell even sounded and ran for the exit. Berry ran a few blocks until he felt he’d outpaced anybody who wanted to kick fifteen kinds of shit out of him. Then he headed for the cathedral. If Randy and Marc ever heard of Berry’s big moment, they’d already forgotten about it by the time rehearsal started. They were too busy getting jazzed about that night’s sleepover in the Twelve Step room.

Four girls turned up for the sleepover, but no Lisa. Rebecca and Jee both had been at the True Love Waits gathering. They gave Berry warm head-tosses when they arrived at the pizza joint where the gang had agreed to gather. Berry knew Julie from Choir Camp, but didn’t know the fourth girl, Betty, at all. All the girls wore little backless blouses tied with strings in back, petal skirts, and platforms.

Berry studied the girls for clues. Mr. Allen and the older choirboys drilled the younger boys endlessly on how to walk, sit, and stand. How to look skyward and keep up with your music. The right facial expression. How to kneel or take communion. But Berry couldn’t see any such choreography in the girls’ movements. One moment they’d belch and giggle like guys, the next they’d strike exaggerated poses, legs just so, chins tilted, eyes a little wide. It was like Rebecca and pals kept forgetting to give a performance.

“You would have gotten a lot more girls,” Jee crunched garlic bread and scattered crumbs on her wavy rainbow stockings, “if you’d done this anywhere but that Twelve Step room. It smells down there. I don’t think they cleaned the carpet after that drunk guy threw up on the facilitator.” “We won’t sit on the carpet,” Teddy said.

“None of us had a house cool enough to host something like this,” said Wilson. “And we wanted to have it at the church. It’s central and people could tell their parents they were going to a church thing without lying so much.”

“My mom nearly called the church to find out more about this thing,” said Rebecca. “I had to tell her it was being organized by some people from Omaha who were on the road doing youth events and the cathedral wouldn’t know about it.”

“Omaha?” said Teddy.

“Hey, bullshit pump not primed.”

“As long as that creepy Canon or that weird Verger don’t show up or something,” said Jee.

“The Canon’s out of town at a conference,” said Teddy. “And this is the Verger’s night to sneak around the skating rink.”

“What is the deal with Canon Moosehead anyway?” asked Julie, the non-choirgirl. She had a big hairband, frizzy dark hair, and cat glasses.

“Julie and I bailed from his True Love Waits thing when it turned into True Love Drools,” Betty added.

“He’s been under a lot of pressure,” said Randy. Teddy snorted behind his hand.

“I heard he puts this metal clamp on his ... thing to keep it from getting hard,” said Marc. “I heard it has spikes and stuff so it hurts if he starts.”

“Dude, that is so gross,” said Julie.

“Cock spikes,” said Marc. “I kid you not.”

“A crown of thorns,” said Teddy in between snorts.

“Poor guy,” Berry mumbled. “I mean, he didn’t ask to have his thing start acting up.” Everybody ignored him.

Finally the cathedral and its offices were dead enough to let the six boys and four girls sneak back in. Randy produced copies of the Verger’s “borrowed” keys. They went back across the street and down to the dark hallway under the cathedral offices. Nobody could see more than a few feet past the bottom of the stairs. “Fuck,” said Randy. “Where’s the light switch?” Marc stumbled over a huge crucifix.

“Find candles,” Teddy said.

They stumbled for a while. Berry stepped on someone’s foot. A girl’s, judging from the high “eep” that followed. Berry thought he heard a rat. One of the boys started singing some hymn about being in the dark and going astray. Teddy shut up whoever it was.

“What if we’re trapped down here in the dark? Anybody got a cell phone?” one of the girls asked.

“I can get us out again,” said Randy.

Finally, Marc lit a giant candle. “We’ve got a couple of them,” he said. “It’ll be cool to do this by candlelight anyway. That way you won’t even see the stains.”

Randy found the right key to let them all into the Twelve Step room after some trial and error. He left them with one candle and took the other one in search of the Bishop’s punch. Teddy found a censer and some incense among all the random stuff in the hallway. He loaded up the canister with incense and swung it around until smoke flowed around the room and the candlelight streamed between its fingers. The smoke and candles made cool patterns on the wall.

“Great,” said Jee. “Now it smells like perfumey smoke in here.”

“It’s romantic,” Teddy said.

“I guess,” said Rebecca, “in a Satan’s armpit way.”

Randy rolled in a big barrel. “I think this is it,” he said. He opened a big stopper in the top and poured some of the contents into an empty three-liter Coke bottle.

“Careful,” Teddy said. “Like we really want to leave the Twelve Step room smelling of punch.”

The punch smelled sort of vinegary, but Berry still took a big swig. He wondered if the punch’s secret ingredient was actually communion wine that had been left out too long. Mixed with extra fruit juice and/or water, it might have been drinkable. Maybe. “Gross,” said Becca.

“Good for your small intestine,” said Teddy.

A second empty Coke bottle showed up for the traditional spin-the-bottle game. Every lurch of the bottle made Berry jumpy. He was terrified the bottle would point at him, but also that it wouldn’t and he’d be left out.

Apart from “no gay stuff,” whoever spun had to kiss whomever the bottle pointed to. Then the recipient had to spin. Teddy kissed Becca. Becca kissed Wilson (who looked flustered). Wilson kissed Julie. Julie kissed Randy and then the bottle rolled to a stop facing a pair of huge, shredded Reeboks that belonged to no teen.

“Can I join in?” asked a tobacco-wrecked woman’s voice.

Randy grabbed a candle and held it up. Marge, one of the homeless people who hung around the cathedral for the Hungry Souls and other services, had joined the circle. The

candle light made the many lines on her face look infinitely deep. Even in an incense cloud, she smelled of sweat. Marc, whose parents knew Marge, hid his face in the shadows. “What are you doing here?” Randy demanded.

“Sacking out. Or I was until you guys made all this noise. What are you guys doing here?”

“What does it look like?”

“Hmm. Judging from the bottle and all the lipstick on the boys’ faces, I’d say Yahtzee. Or Monopoly. Speaking of which, aren’t you girls young for lipstick?”

“Oh, fashion tips from a bag lady,” sniffed Julie.

“I heard
Skank
magazine needed a new columnist,” said Jee.

“Hey,” said Marge. “You think I wasn’t a teeny bopper sneaking into the church after dark once? You think I was always old and trashed and sleeping outside?”

“Like I’ve given your life story so much thought,” said Jee. “Look,” said Randy. “Neither of us is supposed to be here. So why don’t we just leave each other alone, and we won’t tell if you won’t?”

“Fair enough,” said Marge. “But if I were you guys, I’d move on from spin the bottle. Gets old fast, won’t get you into anyone’s pants. You run through all the combinations pretty quick. Now Truth Or Dare, that’s a player’s game.” “Thanks for sharing,” said Teddy.

“Trick is, make the questions really personal and unpleasant—nothing about menstruation, mind—and the dares deceptively easy at first, then raunchier and raunchier. You’ll have ’em down to bra and panties in an hour, sucking twinkies in two. Of course, you got all night, right?” “Thanks. See ya,” said Teddy.

“We’ll try not to disturb your rest any more,” said Wilson.

After Marge finally ambled off, the ten kids sat around the candles in silence. Berry felt the punch eat his stomach and the incense jerk his gag reflex.

“So,” said Teddy. “Wanna play another game?”

Jee had a cell phone in her hand. “How much do you think a cab would be from here?”

“I’m in,” said Julie. “I got ten bucks.”

“Who wants punch?” Teddy asked desperately.

Nobody wanted punch. Within fifteen minutes, the girls had a cab. The boys sat a spell, watching the candles burn down. Then Randy stood. “I’ll put the punch back. Get this mess cleaned up, nobody’ll know we were here. With luck, we’ll catch the last bus.” Berry and Wilson were the last to stand up.

“Sorry it didn’t pan out,” said Berry.

“Hey,” said Wilson. “I got to kiss two girls.” He gave Berry a hand up.

9.

The wind baited Berry. It found every path into his robes and chilled his head. His cassock and surplice barely protected him. He hadn’t had time to grab his blazer from the choir room. The further he got from St. Luke’s, the dumber he felt in his robes. People eating burgers or pumping gas kept turning to watch him tread the sidewalk. When Berry tried to walk the way a choirboy should, Maura or Lisa pulled his sleeve to speed him up.