Paranoid Park (10 page)

I started to cry. There was already so much pain in the world. And what had I done? I had made it worse. I had made it so much worse.

After I’d cried, though, I felt better. And then I started having strange thoughts. I looked around and wondered why people didn’t steal stuff from churches. There was no one supervising, and there was all this stuff—benches and books, maybe some of the metal stuff was gold. I checked the ceiling for cameras. I was glad I hadn’t said anything out loud. They probably thought I was some kid crying because my dog died. I wish my dog had died. But no, I didn’t wish that.

Then something even more weird happened. When I walked out of the church, I felt awesome. I felt like the biggest shitkicker. I strutted down the street like,
Don’t mess with me, muthafucka.
I stared at these girls in the park like,
You think your boyfriends are tough? You don’t know tough!

But that was so evil and wrong, and just as suddenly, I felt so awful I could barely walk.
What was wrong with me?
I would have cried more, but I was cried out. I wondered how long it would take for this to wear off. I tried to imagine myself in five years, or ten; would I ever be able to just walk down the street?

And that was the
best-
case scenario. There was still the possibility of getting caught.

I walked more. I watched the downtown people heading home from work. They wore suits and business clothes and got into nice cars. They probably had stuff in their past-mistakes, bad things they’d done. Everyone must. I thought about soldiers in Iraq, in Vietnam, and every other war. They
had
to kill people. And they had to live with it. Soldiers through all of history did. And it wasn’t like killing people was some bizarre event that never happened. Someone got killed on TV every two point five minutes. All you did in video games was kill people.

But what were you supposed to do with that weight? Once it was on you? Just be a man? Just suck it up? Maybe you were. Maybe that was the real test. Maybe that’s exactly the thing that made you a man: the ability to function with the worst possible secrets in your brain. Which was why so many grown-up men seemed so ridiculous. They’d never felt that weight. They never felt that responsibility. They were untested, unproven; they were boys in grown-up clothes.

They were like my dad.

There was a big party at Christian Barlow’s on Friday. Jennifer bugged me about it all week.

I went early to hang out with Jared and check out the half-pipe Christian had built in his backyard. I didn’t have a board so I bummed Jared’s, but I totally sucked. I couldn’t do anything. After I fell on my ass a couple times, I gave up and sat in the grass with the non-skaters. That was okay, though; it was a perfect late-September evening-warm, with the smell of leaves in the air. People could tell it was the last of the summer. Everyone was kicking back. I tried my best to enjoy it.

Then Macy McLaughlin showed up. She was with her cool sophomore friends. They stayed in their little pack, not talking to anyone. They were all dressed up, trying to look good for the upperclassmen.

When Macy saw me, she came over. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I said back.

She looked at the half-pipe. “How come you’re not skating?”

“Don’t feel like it.”

Another of her friends walked over. They both stood there. I was lying in the grass, my head on Jared’s board.

“You guys can sit down if you want,” I said.

They didn’t want to. They had to go inside with their friends.

I watched them walk away. It was weird how the younger kids come up. I remembered my first parties, standing around, trying to look cool, trying to act like I knew what I was doing.

Those were the kinds of problems you’re supposed to have when you’re young.

When it got dark, everyone moved inside. It was a good party. People seemed really happy and excited for the new school year. I looked around for Jennifer, but she hadn’t shown up. So I wandered around and played foosball with some guys in the basement.

Jennifer arrived at about ten thirty. She and Petra made a big entrance. They had been at Elizabeth Gould’s having “cocktails,” and now they were drunk and wanted to dance and whoop it up. I avoided them. Instead I sat in the backyard with Jared and some other seniors. That’s where Macy appeared again. She had momentarily lost her friends and came and sat next to me. We didn’t really say anything, and then she saw her friends again and ran off.

When she was gone, Jared asked me who she was, and I said it was Macy McLaughlin, who lived down the street from me.

He said she was cute. The other guys agreed. They were like, Dude where did she come from?

I was like,
Calm down, she’s practically my kid sister.

But they didn’t care. They thought she was hot.

Around midnight, Jennifer found me. She grabbed me by the hand and pulled me upstairs. She had apparently staked out a room to make out or whatever. It was someone’s bedroom, a little girl’s.

Jennifer locked the door and put her arms around me and made this big show of being the sexy girl who’d waited all night to get with her guy. She kept making sexy faces, like she was wild with passion.

It all happened pretty fast. We got on the bed and she crawled on top of me. At first, I was into it. She smelled good and it was easy to lose myself in the moment. But then I realized how serious she was. This was it. This was the big moment. She wanted to lose “it” tonight. She’d made up her mind.

I didn’t try to stop her. I should have. The whole situation was so weird anyway. For most of it, I felt like I wasn’t even there, like I was outside my body, floating above the whole thing. At one point I was like,
Please, God, just let this be over
.
I give up. I don’t know how to be human. Everything I do is wrong, and everything else I do just makes it worse.

Afterward, we snuggled, but even that seemed like an act. Everything people did was an act. People did what they thought they were supposed to do. Learn to kiss at fourteen. Learn to drive at fifteen. Learn to have sex at sixteen. Life was easy. Just follow the schedule, don’t make any big mistakes, and everything will be fine.

Jennifer caressed the side of my head. “That was
amazing,”
she breathed into my ear.

I nodded.

“Do you think we should do it again?” she asked, lifting her head. “Or do you want to wait? Maybe we should wait. We’re going to need more condoms. We should go buy some. They have them at Rite Aid. That’s where Petra and Mike get theirs.”

She lay back down and turned onto her back. “You were so good,” she sighed. “Was I good?”

“Yes,” I answered. We lay like that for another few minutes. Then she got restless. “Oh my God, I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. She went into the little bathroom beside the bed, stopping to dig her cell phone out of her jeans.

I could hear her in the bathroom. She dropped the toilet seat down. I heard her dialing her cell phone. She squealed into it. “Yes!
Yes!”
she whispered. “We
totally
did it.... Oh my God, it was
fantastic!”

I couldn’t hear what else she said. I got up. I found my boxers and put them on. Jennifer flushed the toilet and came out. She picked up her clothes, too. “Should we go back downstairs?” she asked me.

“Sure,” I said.

We went back to the party. As soon as we reached the bottom of the stairs, she ran into the living room to find her friends. I turned the other direction, to the backyard. There were still some people standing around the half-pipe in the dark. A freshman was on it, rolling back and forth, trying not to fall. I watched him. It soothed me somehow. Back and forth. Back and forth. Try not to fall....

That whole weekend turned into an extended party. After Friday night, everyone went home and slept, and then the next day, Christian and Jared and a bunch of us went to Paul Auster’s during the day to watch skate videos and play video games. Then we met Jennifer and Elizabeth and those guys for a matinee movie.

Jennifer was so happy. She was grinning super big, and all her friends stared at me and giggled. Elizabeth even said right in front of everyone, “So I guess you guys sealed the deal.”

That night the whole gang of us drove around downtown. On Broadway there were the usual carloads of high-school kids yelling back and forth. We ran around and switched cars. I got in Elizabeth Gould’s car with Jennifer and everyone teased us and made sex jokes. It was like Jennifer’s official de-virginization party. She was the happiest I had ever seen her.

On Sunday, all the guys went to Skate City. I didn’t want to show up without a board, so I got up early and drove my mom’s car to the mall and got another board. I wanted to get the same deck and see if I could scuff it up or whatever-not that that would fool anyone—just to make it less obvious. But they didn’t have it. I got one that was close and paid with my debit card. I had just enough money for it, thanks to the new allowance my dad gave me out of guilt.

So then I met everyone at Skate City. It was funny—with no girls around, nobody talked about Jennifer and me. Nobody cared. That’s part of the skater thing. It’s a place where you forget all that.