Fans of the Impossible Life (17 page)

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It was dark when Mira finished telling me about their night in Provincetown. Sebby had snuck in and joined us on the bed while she was talking. The lights from the vanity illuminated the room with a soft glow. He sat between our legs and listened.

“It's a good story,” he said when she was done.

“What happened after that?” I asked.

“When I didn't answer my phone all night, my parents finally called the police and they tracked the car through the GPS,” Mira said. “They showed up at the motel the next morning.”

“Did you get in trouble?” I asked.

“You don't steal your dad's car and then get forcibly returned to your mother by the police without getting in trouble,” Mira said.

Sebby stretched himself between us and lay down on the pillow, curling a leg over Mira's leg, putting a hand on my
stomach. Connecting us.

“You girls look pretty,” he said.

I suddenly remembered my makeup, and unconsciously put my hand to my lips.

“What's the occasion?” Sebby said.

“We're cleaning out Mira's closet,” I said.

He touched the sequins on my dress. “Looks like it's going well,” he said.

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You made your way back to school for the first time in over a year on a Monday in January, the first day back from winter break. You figured you would show up and at least get your name in for attendance, then you could use the library computer to do some research on getting your GED. Would it be possible to convince the state that you were being homeschooled? Tilly would love that. Just have you home reading Bible verses and changing diapers all day.

You passed through the metal detector at the front door to get inside. The halls were jammed with people so much tighter than Mira's school, the inevitability of bodies bumping up against each other adding to the overall sense of dread that had always permeated this place. You stuck your hands in your pockets, put your head down, and tried to forge a path through the middle, avoiding the clumps of people gathered at the lockers on either side.

What was the plan here? Head to the office first to find out what your homeroom was. Drop off the forged doctor's note you had worked on all week explaining that complications from your injuries had prevented you from attending in the fall. You handed it over in exchange for your schedule, no questions asked. They didn't have time for your problems here.

The bell for first period rang just as you were walking out of the office. Those running late forced their way past you to get to their classrooms. You looked at the piece of paper in your hand.
Chemistry
, it said.
Mr. Walters—Room 248
.

The last stragglers were dashing into closing classroom doors when you saw him.

He was bigger now. That must have helped him with his prospects on the football team. Maybe he no longer felt like a “pansy Asian kid,” which was what the other guys on the team used to call him. Put on enough muscle and no one can accuse you of being weak.

That had been what he was upset about on the day that it all went down. Another day of them torturing him in practice, under the guise of hazing the freshman. All in good fun.

You had been waiting outside the gym for him to finish showering. You had the answers for the next day's history test and you had promised to deliver them to him. You both had trouble in history.

The other team members had slowly filtered out of the gym. You were sitting on the ground outside the door twisting a twig in your hand, trying to look inconspicuous. It wasn't
working. Finally you gave up, tossed the twig, and went inside the locker room. Two of the bigger upperclassmen pushed past you on your way in.

“Watch it, twink,” one grumbled as you grazed his shoulder.

He was in the middle locker aisle, sitting on a bench, a towel wrapped around his waist. He was alone.

“Theo?” you said.

He looked up.

“Yeah. Hey, Sebby.”

“I have the answers for the history test,” you said.

He nodded, then looked back at his feet. This smaller version of him, his shoulder blades sticking out like pointy new wings from his back when he hunched over. His black hair hung damp in his face.

“What is it?” you said. You went over and sat next to him on the bench. You put your arm around him. “What's wrong, puddin' pop?”

He smiled in spite of himself. He found you amusing. You knew this.

“Fucking practice,” he said. “It's always ‘fuck up the skinny Asian kid,' you know? Like, who am I to think I can play?”

“You'll just have to prove them wrong,” you said. Your arm was still around him. Damp skin. You squeezed his shoulder affectionately.

“I'm not going to get a chance if they keep fucking piling on me.” He looked at the arm closest to you. There was a large bruise running down the side of it.

“Aww,” you said. “Poor baby.” You made a circle around the bruise with your finger. “Bruises heal,” you said.

“I guess,” he said. “Fucking hurts right now.”

You weren't going to do it. You knew that you shouldn't. No good could come of it. Not here. And then you did it anyway. Leaned down and very lightly kissed his arm right above the bruise. Just to feel the brush of his skin on your lips. To show some tenderness. This was your method of kindness.

“What the fuck is this?” came a mocking voice from the shadows.

Someone was laughing. “Told you Theo was a fucking faggot.”

Theo jumped up, pushing you away, hard.

“What the fuck?” he said loudly, to you, not to them. But he had hesitated for too long.

It was the boys you had passed on the way into the locker room. Seniors, both enormous, both born looking for a fight.

“Hey, faggots, get out of our fucking locker room,” the first one said. They were emerging from the shadows now, slowly, animals stalking their prey.

“Fuck you,” you said.

“Looks like the one you want to fuck is Theo,” the second one said.

You could feel your heart pounding. This day had already not been going well. An F on a paper you legitimately put work into. A talking-to by another teacher about your lack of participation in class. And tonight Tilly expected you to take the kids
to church study group. You were in no mood.

“Whatever,” you said.

You reached into your pocket and pulled out the answers to the history test. You held them out to Theo.

“Here,” you said. “Just take it.”

“What's that? A love letter?” the first guy said. They were close now, the two of them standing at the edge of the bench where you had been sitting. Theo was frozen in front of you. He didn't take the paper.

“Yeah,” you said, turning to the first boy. “It's for your dad. It says thanks for blowing me in your car last night.”

And that was it. He was on you as soon as you got the last word out. You felt his knee in your stomach first, and then his fist connected with your face the same time the back of your head hit the concrete floor and the fluorescent light on the ceiling above you turned to stars. You tried to hold your hands up in front of your face but the other one was holding you down. You tasted blood in your mouth, felt it running down from your nose. He was not stopping. This was not going to stop.

The last thing you saw before you blacked out was Theo, still standing there in his towel. Doing nothing.

And now here he was. And here you were. You saw him before he saw you. Standing at the other end of the hallway closing his locker and turning the combination lock. Then he looked up.

“Oh, fuck,” he said.

You saw his new muscles tense under his T-shirt. You said nothing.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

You walked toward him a few feet. He moved backward, as if you were contaminated.

“I go to school here,” you said.

“I thought you were gone.”

You stared at him.

“Like dead?” you said. “Did you think they fucking killed me?”

“No. I knew you were okay . . .” he said.

“I wasn't, actually,” you said. “I wasn't okay at all.”

Someone called to him from the stairwell.

“Look, please, uh . . .” He was looking behind him, stepping backward. “Please, just . . . don't talk to me.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“No . . . just . . . pretend you don't know me, okay? It'll make things easier.”

You watched in disbelief as he turned and ran to the stairwell, clambered his newly large body down to whoever had been calling him. And then you were alone. The sound of sneakers squeaking on freshly buffed floors somewhere. The smell of industrial cleaner. You felt like you were going to throw up.

You headed back through the metal detector, out the front door. Outside it was freezing. You didn't have a real winter coat. Just your hoodie and a tattered jean jacket. The wind grabbed at your eyes and did you the favor of pulling out tears so you
wouldn't have to try to stop them.

Fuck this fucking place.

On the other side of the expanse of dead brown lawn, a figure was leaning on a car, smoking a cigarette.

You looked at the piece of paper still in your hand. Chemistry, it said.
Mr. Walters—Room 248
. It was a page full of fictions.
French. Mrs. Alderson. Algebra. Mr. Stein.
None of this was real.

You shoved the paper in your pocket and walked toward the figure.

“Hey, Sebby,” he said when you reached him.

“Hey, Nick,” you said.

He offered you a cigarette. You took it. He lit it for you, cupping the flame against the wind.

“I was wondering when I was going to see you around here,” he said.

“Yeah. I can't, uh . . .” You didn't have words. There was no way to talk about any of this.

“You okay?” Nick said.

You shook your head.

Nick threw the stub of his cigarette on the ground and opened the driver's-side door.

“Come on,” he said. “Let's get out of here.”

You took in a deep breath of nicotine and opened the passenger side and got in. As Nick started the car you looked back once, knowing it was the last time. Knowing that you would not be coming back.

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Sebby showed up at my house alone one night in late January, looking glassy eyed and hungry. We had already eaten dinner, but Dad and Dave heated up leftovers for him and we sat and watched him eat like he was a lost kitten who might drown in a full saucer of milk.

He came up to my room with me after he finished. It was the first time we had been alone in a while. Alone in my bedroom.

“Are you okay?” I said, walking in the room behind him.

“Yeah,” he said, pushing off his shoes and getting on my bed. “Shut the door, okay?”

I looked out in the hallway. I could hear Dad and Dave cleaning up in the kitchen. I closed the door.

“What's up?” I said.

“Come here,” he said. His eyes had a half closed, dreamy look.

I sat next to him on the bed and he pulled me toward him, pulled my face to his and kissed me. I could smell the unmistakable skunky odor of pot on his clothes. His hands found my back and made their way under my shirt. I followed his lead, letting my own hands find skin. Then his fingers moved to my fly. I pulled away.

“What?” he said.

“My dads.”

“We'll be quiet,” he said.

I shook my head.

“They could come up here,” I said.

“Fine,” he said, pushing his back up against the wall. There was something petulant and angry in his eyes, as if he couldn't understand why he was being denied.

“We can kiss,” I said. “You can kiss me.”

“Oh, can I?”

We sat for a minute in awkward silence.

“Why did you come over here?” I said.

“I was with Nick and his friends and I didn't want to go home. Why, I can't come over?”

“No, I mean, why did you come here instead of Mira's house?”

He shrugged.

“Nick, from the diner?” I asked. “Ali's friend Nick?”

“Yeah. He goes to my school.”

He looked at his hands.

“You're pretty . . . high, right now. Right?”
God, I sound like
such a loser.

“Yeah,” he said. “Why? You want some?”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “My dads. I can't.”

He seemed mesmerized by his hands for another minute and then suddenly he said, “Can I stay here tonight?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “I mean, I have to ask.”

He nodded and then looked down again. I had never seen him like this before. Unsure of himself.

Dad and Dave agreed that he could stay and we set up a sleeping bag on the floor next to my bed. He curled up in it as soon as we laid it out, so I got ready for bed early, said good night to my dads, turned out the light and got in bed. I turned so I was facing him on the floor, watched the sleeping bag rise and fall with his breathing.

“Jeremy?” he said, rolling over to face me.

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for letting me stay.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

My eyes were slowly adjusting to the dark. I could make out the outline of his features.

“Are you really okay?” I asked.

He didn't answer. He unzipped the sleeping bag and got up, came over to the bed. I moved over and he lay down next to me, got under the covers.

“Yeah,” he said. “I'm okay.”

It was so familiar at this point, to be lying next to him. We just weren't usually alone when it happened. And the newness of
his reaching for me earlier had thrown me. It had been months since we had first kissed, but I wasn't sure what it would mean to move beyond that, to have a real intimacy with him that didn't include Mira. And I wasn't sure that what he needed on this night was about me at all.

“I'm sorry about before,” I said. “I was just worried . . . with other people home.”

“It's okay,” he said.

“It's not that I don't want to,” I said. We were whispering now, our faces next to each other on the pillow. “I just haven't, uh, done much.”

“Much?”

“Yeah. Anything. Much.”

“I get it,” he said.

“I want to,” I said.

“Just not tonight.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

“Can I stay here?” he said. “Next to you?”

I nodded. He stretched a tentative hand across the blankets on top of my chest.

“Like this? This is okay?”

I laughed, tried to laugh as a whisper. “Yes, Sebby, it's okay.”

He smiled and kissed me again. I tried to let myself relax, to not feel as though some forbidden dream had just manifested in my room. We fell asleep like that, holding each other in my
little twin bed.

There are problems that go along with becoming a person who needs other people. Especially if you have invested most of your identity in being alone. It hadn't been a nice way to live, exactly, but I had been self-sufficient in my solitude. Now I was carrying the persistent itch of an emotion around with me, feeding it like some kind of desperate pet.

I was alone in the art studio on a Monday in early February. Mira and Rose both had papers due, so they went home after last period to work on them. Sebby had stayed at my house again the night before. He showed up after my dads were asleep, texted me to come down and let him in. He was sweating and jittery instead of glassy eyed this time. We didn't say anything to each other, and I wasn't sure if we were just being quiet so as not to disturb my dads or if there was something really wrong. He lay down in my bed with me again and I held him, his body twitching through the night. It felt like I barely slept, but I must have drifted off, because when I opened my eyes in the morning he was gone.

I had made it more than halfway through the year at this point and I was trying to avoid taking stock, counting up my gains and losses. Inventory in this moment seemed unwise. It was still too fragile.

The solution was to focus on something else. I was making progress in my painting for the exhibit. A three-by-five-foot
canvas with three figures, surrounded by a wash of color. I still hadn't worked on the faces. They stared out at me, blank and inhuman, begging for completion.

Next to me, gnarled old tubes of school-supply paint lay on the table with a palate caked with years of colors, the history of every student who had tried to get something down, bring something out of their heads into the open. I was procrastinating by lining the paints up neatly next to my brushes. I looked out the window. It had snowed during the night, but it was raining now, turning the snow to dismal slush.

Talia came into the room so quietly that I didn't notice, didn't know when she spoke how long she had been there.

“That's a large canvas,” she said.

I looked around. She was standing behind me.

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah. I guess so.”

“I was wondering what you were working on. You've kept it such a secret.”

“Just wanted to wait for people to see it in the show, I guess.”

She walked up to the easel, examined the faceless figures in the dim light coming in from the windows. She picked up a tube of paint.

“Pretty blue,” she said.

Angel eyes blue.

“Yeah,” I said.

She put the tube down, straightened it so it lined up with the others.

“You're here late,” I said.

“I had Math Club. I just came in to get some drawing paper for my project.”

“Still planning on doing landscapes?”

“Yes.”

She went over to the shelves where the paper was kept and pulled out a few sheets. I picked up the blue tube of paint and felt the metal wrinkles of it in my hand.

“Jeremy?” she said.

“Yeah?”

“I've been meaning to say something to you.”

I turned to look at her, standing next to the shelves, clutching the sheets of paper as if they might cover something shameful.

“What?”

“I should have said it before, but I didn't want to risk upsetting you. I'm not sure sometimes exactly how to say things to people.”

“Okay,” I said.

“It's just that . . . I'm glad that you came back. To school. After everything.”

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”

“And I want you to know how much I regret that I didn't step in during class that day. You were right about
Gatsby
, of course, that's a common interpretation of that passage. If I had said something, supported you, then you wouldn't have been alone. It might not have become so . . . personal.”

“Oh, Talia. I don't think it would have made a difference.”

“But it might have,” she said. She looked like she might start
crying. “It was cowardly of me to hesitate in that moment.”

“What happened was not your fault,” I said.

“I just wish it could have gone differently.”

“Well, yeah, me too.”

She looked down at the paper in her hands. “Peter said that I should say something to you, since it's been on my mind. He's really very insightful when it comes to matters of the human spirit.”

I smiled. “That's true,” I said.

She looked at the painting again.

“You seem like you're doing better,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”

Then something changed in her face, as if snapping her back into propriety. The softness that had crept in was gone.

“Anyway. I have my landscapes to work on. Peter recommended a few books for reference that should be helpful.”

“I'm sure they'll be great,” I said.

She turned to leave.

“Hey, Talia,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“When I came to school that day and saw my locker, I was glad that you were there. I don't know what I would have done if I had been alone. So, you know, thank you.”

“Oh,” she said. “You're welcome.”

Then I was alone in the empty room, only the sound of the hissing from the old institutional radiator disrupting the silence.

I looked at my canvas. The edges could have been neater,
strings hanging from the corners. I picked up the blue tube again, unscrewed the cap, and squeezed a perfect line of paint onto the palate. I wanted to leave it there like that. Wonderful in its possibility. As soon as I brushed it on the canvas I was responsible for it, for the inevitable imperfections. My world had always been like that paint, left on a palate. That color was a passive observer. But now it wanted to make something of itself. And I was terrified.

Pick up a brush, put it in the paint, touch the canvas. That's all there was to it. I had asked to stop being afraid. And I wanted to believe that I could.