Perfectly Good White Boy (3 page)

“I've seen it a million times,” I whispered back. Then her arm slinked around me and pulled me closer and it was nice, but I was nervous so I just kept talking. Told her some more about the Thrift Bin. About how nursing homes donated all this crap from dead old people. About how people left half-eaten Happy Meals and dirty diapers in the customer bathroom. About how homeless people came in and changed into new outfits in the dressing room and then walked out, leaving their nasty reeking hobo clothes on the dressing room floor.

She listened to all of it, which was good, because it stopped her from freaking out. And she clutched me closer so I could tell her more. Her favorite part was when I told her about the little shelf of strange shit we kept in the break room. Which was the idea of this girl in my grade named Neecie Albertson, who just started working in the back room sorting donations. Neecie was this sort of quiet nerdy chick; she had bad hearing, I guess, because back in junior high, she used to have to carry around this little bag with, like, equipment in it, including a microphone the teachers clipped to their shirts so she could hear them during lectures. Though she stopped doing that in ninth grade for some reason. Anyway, Neecie liked collecting all the weird, broken, shitty trash that got donated. And it got so huge that one day Kerry, my boss, said he'd build a shelf for it and nailed one up quick on the break room wall with old boards he'd scrounged from pallets behind the Dumpster. People would give Neecie stuff they found while sorting, and then she'd decide what she liked best from that day and put it up on the pallet-shelf thing with a little caption about it. Which was pretty entertaining. Wendy, the store manager, loved it. Thought it was perfect for the staff to do when it was sucky and hot with no air-conditioning in the back donation room. Everyone took turns trying to find stuff that Neecie would put up there. Usually it wasn't anything we could sell. A used douche kit. A girl's diary. A greasy pack of playing cards with naked-lady pictures on them. A full bottle of booze with another language all over the label.

“That sounds so cool,” Hallie said.

“Not as cool as being a lifeguard. Wish someone would pay me to sit in the sun all day.”

“It gets so hot and sweaty. And the kids are totally annoying. Their moms too. It's mostly just really boring. But it looks good on college applications, so I did it.”

“Lifeguarding gets you into college?”

“Well, no,” she said. “But my parents thought it was a good idea. I did a million other things to get into college. You know. You'd have done them all last year. Junior year's the big year for that. ACT and stuff.”

I shrugged. “I didn't really do shit,” I said.

“What are you going to do after you graduate, then?”

Great. Now Hallie Martin had something in common with my mother. And my brother Brad. And Grandpa Chuck. Everyone asked me that question, had been asking me that since forever. I was so fucking sick of that goddamn question.

“I don't know. Maybe I'll work at McDonald's. I hear that's a good career path.”

She pushed me a little. “Come on! Be serious.”

I gripped her waist harder; suddenly, I felt like we might tip out of the goddamn deer stand and splatter on the ground.

“I don't know. Might join the Marines or something.”

“Really?” She sounded, again, fascinated, in the same way she had about the Thrift Bin stories. Like I was somewhat crazy and she couldn't wait to tell her friends about it. Though I didn't really get it. Oak Prairie was still a pretty small town in a lot of ways, even though now it was becoming a fancier expanded outer-ring suburb of Minneapolis. But even so, plenty of people here still chose the military after high school. Not the people who were popular or worth a damn socially, obviously. But people like me? I didn't exactly come from a family of high-rollers or geniuses. My brother ran a tree-trimming service. My dad, when he had a job, worked for a farm equipment place. My mom was the only one with college. She was a school psychologist, though; that didn't make much money either.

“I don't know.” I suddenly felt a little dumb. I mean, I hadn't thought about it that much. Not much beyond that the Marines seemed like the coolest of the military branches to join, at least. I didn't have a thing for airplanes or ships, plus Grandpa Chuck had been in the Navy and talked shit about it all the time. And Brad had once considered the Army, but my mom had freaked out a little, being that she's all about nonviolence and whatever because of all the fucked-up abused kids she deals with, but then Brad met his fiancée, Krista, who drove that whole Army idea out of his mind.

“Joining the Marines,” Hallie said like she was testing it out. “I mean, wouldn't that be like just saying, ‘Come kill me in a war?'” she asked.

“They do give you a gun, you know.”

She laughed, and I shushed her. She held me tighter around the neck, and I could feel her boobs against me again. God.

“You must be really brave,” she said, pulling away again.

“Not really.”

“You're way braver than me,” she said. “Way tougher.”

This made me think that she knew all about the thing with Eddie. There was a lot of shit that had happened this year, until my dad finally left, but the day I broke Eddie's nose and got suspended for a week was what everyone knew about. But I wouldn't have called any of that “tough.” Or
brave.
I hated that word:
brave
. I knew that when it counted, I was not brave at all. Even if this girl, this beautiful awesome girl, thought I was.

Cars began pulling out, and we leaned forward to see what might be happening. I was listening to the cop radio, or at least trying to. Hallie had rested her head against the tree trunk. Like she was tired of me. I wanted to keep telling her stuff so she'd laugh. But I was running out of things to say. And I was getting pretty fidgety, because her being deathly quiet just lit up my ass with worry that she would tell me this was a mistake, all of it, the kissing and getting in the tent and everything else. Like, any girl who was worth anything good might get to a point after so many hours in a deer stand that she decided what was wrong with this situation wasn't the cops but
you.

It was five in the morning when we came down. Though the cops had been gone a while before that, Hallie made us wait because she worried they might come back. Which I thought was unlikely, but I just went along with it. I climbed down first and waited for her to climb down, too, trying not to be super gross about looking up her skirt, but then not caring, given that I'd done it on the way up the tree, too. But once we were back on the ground, the touching thing seemed over. Because it was near dawn and the party was busted and now Hallie had to go back to normal. Stop getting naked with random younger guys and turn back into a pumpkin or whatever.

The sun was just coming up over the cornfield. The dirt was black and sticky as fuck, all plowed up in thick rows for spring planting. It was amazing we'd been able to run as fast as we had through it. I supposed Hallie's cowboy boots were actually useful in that. My shoes were completely caked, and I dragged them on the gravel and stretched my legs out.

Hallie found a ticket on her car, for illegal parking or some stupid shit. We went looking for Eddie's car and the tent we'd set up, but no luck.

“Can I get a ride?” I asked Hallie as she dug through her bag for her phone and stuff. I felt a little shy about asking, but I didn't have any choice, really.

“Sure,” she said. In this sort of yeah, whatever kind of voice that just killed me, really. That's the problem with getting what you want. Then you have to worry about it being gone.

“Thanks,” I said, and then gulped, because she slipped off her T-shirt and changed into a clean tank top. Swapped out her cowboy boots for flip-flops. All like it was no big deal. Like I just got an all-access pass to her body from here on out. Or maybe it was friend-zoning, like Eddie always warned against? Still, I had The Horn for her again. How could I not?

But then she lent me her toothbrush, didn't even think that was gross, me using it or spitting toothpaste all over the ground. She actually laughed, watching me do it. And once our teeth were brushed and she had washed her face with the hose from the back of the house and she put on fresh lip gloss and stuff, she kissed me. And made fun of my sticking-up hair. And said she thought I was cute.

Then, the sun in my eyes making me wish I had the sunglasses I'd left in Eddie's car, she drove us back to town. Everything so easy. Like we planned it. Maybe she
had
planned it? But it felt like both our ideas. Like it was all meant to happen.

I'd think about that morning so many times. How I was dead tired and probably still half drunk and my balls ached but how it all was so good. How she stopped at a gas station to wash the mud off her windshield. How I bought her a giant orange juice and myself an Amp and a box of donuts and how she freaked out and said, “What do I need a dozen donuts for, Sean?” How I said she could have one or two, but the rest were for me. And how that made her laugh, and how that was good, very good, but that I was only half kidding and ate most of the box. And how she drove me home, then, but I wouldn't let her come up the drive, saying it was so my mom wouldn't notice.

I should have felt stupid then, but I didn't. Even a mile from this crappy house I hated, kissing her good-bye in her tiny red perfect girl-car—which was all smooth and glossy like a makeup case—was pretty much the best I'd felt in a while.

Her mouth full of sugar flakes and cherry filling. Her little laughs in my ear. My hands climbing up her shirt and The Horn hard as hell in my jeans. How fucked up and good life was. One minute you're drinking beer in a barn, the next life sends a Frisbee bashing into your face and a girl so beautiful and perfect you can't decide if it's some giant joke or just you getting what you deserve, finally, finally, after so many years of not.

Chapter Two

I came into the kitchen to see my brother Brad laying on the kitchen floor, pulling the guts out of our broke-dick dishwasher. Brad hadn't lived with us for years; he had an apartment with his fiancée Krista, but since we'd moved to the rental, he was over all the time. Helping my mom with stuff. Seeing if he could get salvage titles for the motorcycles the previous renters had left in the backyard. Loading up other junk in the yard, a busted microwave and an old hot water heater, and taking it all to the dump. Fixing all the broken stuff the last renters had wrecked, everything from towel bars to closet door hinges to busted windowpanes and screens. So much shit needed fixing. Which I guess was good. I couldn't fix shit.

That morning, I said my usual Brad-greeting: “What's up, idiot.”

Brad gave me my usual Sean-greeting: “What's up, douche.” Then went back to his grunting on the floor with all his tools. I started making peanut butter toast and gulping a ton of orange juice out of the jug, not saying anything. Lately, talking to Brad meant him launching into a list of jobs I needed to do around the house for Mom.

When I turned to put away the orange juice, my dog Otis jumped up on the counter and ate one of the pieces of peanut butter toast, and I yelled at him and Brad laughed. Brad was like that: the kind of brother who thought it was super amusing when shitty things happened to other people. Or at least to me. Two weeks before, on the Fourth of July weekend, he'd made us demo one of the crappy old sheds in the backyard because the rambler's landlord knocked money off the rent in exchange for the labor. I'd ended up getting stabbed with a rusty nail and had to go get a tetanus shot, and Brad laughed at that, too. But when I tried to blame our dad for any of this, for me having to sweat my balls off on my one day off from work, or for anything else, either, Brad told me to shut the fuck up.

“I'm busting my ass to help you and Mom out,” Brad had said as we walked into the quick clinic to get my shot. He looked at me with his lips all thin. “Quit acting like a dick.”

I wanted to say it wasn't him, it was our dad, but Brad stomped off ahead of me, and that was that. No discussion. No more laughing, either.

It was one main reason I didn't get along with Brad. Maybe some brothers like each other, or at least have a good time together. But we never did. All Brad did was save the goddamn day and then laugh at me when shit went south. He'd never say one bad thing about our dad. Never once. And no one else could, either. Brad wouldn't have it. It drove me crazy.

I left Brad to be the dishwasher hero, happy to have a job. Happy to be able to get away from the rental and go to work, where there was always something to do and none of it made me feel guilty. It was a normal shift like any other at the Thrift Bin: Wendy was wearing a weird outfit; Neecie Albertson was tagging clothing; Kerry was saying sleazy things; a cashier called us to help carry out a loveseat to the car of this four-hundred-pound man who was driving around on one of those Medicare motor scooters. His wife smelled like baby powder and diapers and bossed us ridiculously about loading the damn thing into their crap-filled minivan. Your basic Thrift Bin regulars, hoarder customers. That day must have been a sale day; the regulars/hoarders crowd always came in on those days to swoop down on whatever they'd been waiting to get marked down.

After the loveseat thing, Kerry bought us Taco Bell for lunch, and then we baled tons of unsaleable clothing into the rag baler, which Kerry was training me on because soon as I turned eighteen, I could legally use it, and then he would celebrate because he hated baling. I remember thinking that would be cool, to be the one doing the baling for a change, so Kerry could handle the donation door (and all the customers and their annoying tax receipts) instead of me.

It was a heat wave, a mid-July kind of thing. The Thrift Bin was pretty horrible in the back, with no A/C.