Reality Boy (24 page)

“Call me if she does anything stupid,” he says.
Ba-boom-ba-boom-ba-boom-ba-boom.

“Do you have unlimited minutes?” I ask, and we both laugh.

Once they finally leave, I pick Hannah up from school (she sneaked out the band room door and met me on the street) and we drive to Franklin Street. On the way there, I tell her about what I’ve figured out.

“I don’t belong in Mr. Fletcher’s class. I never did. I’m fine,” I say.

She nods.

“But my mom wanted me to be retarded so Tasha would be happy. And she wanted Tasha to be happy because Tasha used to hit her all the time, and Lisi and me, and there’s more stuff to the whole thing, but we can talk about that another
day. I mean—what kind of mother wants her kid to be retarded?”

“Can we please start saying
learning disabled
or something?”

“But that’s what she called me,” I say. “It hurt and shit.”
You know how your mother is.

She squeezes my arm. “That totally sucks, you know?”

“But I’m fine, right? I’m not re—learning disabled, am I?” I look over at her as I drive. “Am I?”

“Gerald, did you ever think that her calling you that could have, you know, let her off the hook for all the shit she did to you? Like—the stuff from the show?”

“What do you mean?”

“This is totally going to break rule number three,” she says.

“Go for it.”

“Well, maybe she needed a reason for you to be, you know—doing what you did? So she decided that something was wrong with you, not her.”

“You mean a reason for me to be crapping?”

“Yeah,” she says.

“Huh,” I say. Then my brain races. So, my mother needed me to be
retarded
learning disabled because it would explain why I crapped during
Network Nanny.

Shit.

My mother wanted me to be retarded because it was easier than her turning into a good mother.

Shit.

Nathan and Ashley are watching a National Geographic miniseries about the deepest parts of the sea. It’s their day off.

Ashley isn’t baking anything and Nathan says it’s too early for beer. I find this ironic because I watched my dad drink straight Scotch at nine o’clock this morning.

I demand that Nathan and Ashley adopt me.

Hannah curls up in the chair that’s surrounded by three fish tanks and says hello to Lola and Drake. She notes that there’s a fish missing.

“Yeah. One of the Plecs died this week,” Nathan says.

Hannah frowns. “Poor Luis. He was the best cleaner in the world.”

I sit on the couch by myself and watch Hannah, mostly. She doesn’t even know I’m watching her. She doesn’t notice when Ashley offers her a soda before she goes to the kitchen. She doesn’t see Ashley and Nathan look at her and laugh a little. She doesn’t notice when her phone buzzes in her pocket. She’s in those tanks, swimming around the algae-covered faux castle and the driftwood with her fish friends.

It’s as if Hannah has a Gersday.

As I watch her, I realize that I’m tired and I close my eyes. Napping isn’t something I do. Napping was dangerous in my house while I was growing up. Napping made me an easier target. No one here seems to mind, so I try it.

Next thing I know, Hannah is waking me up, asking what I want for lunch.

“It’s on me,” Nathan says. “I get a discount at the Chinese place.”

“I’m not hungry,” I say. Napping made me not hungry. I yawn.

“He can share mine,” Hannah says.

A half hour later, we’re all eating Chinese food around Ashley and Nathan’s kitchen table. Nathan talks about his job as a driver for a local appliance company. Ashley asks Hannah if she likes working at the PEC Center.

“It’s okay,” Hannah says. “My boss is cool, which is a change.”

“You work there, too, right?” Ashley says to me.

I’m still tired. My stomach is all twisted from my nap. “Yeah,” I say.

“You want an egg roll?” Nathan asks.

When I say “No, thanks,” he offers it to Hannah, who eats it in three bites.

I watch the three of them have a conversation about some news story they saw on TV about a high school junior who got expelled for a bomb threat. Nathan doesn’t agree with Ashley about one part of it and Hannah does. They laugh while they disagree. There’s calm—as if the ninety-nine fish in the house have taught these people how to live in the same tank without resorting to drama. They’re just swimming, eating, living.

Maybe what we needed in the Faust household when I was little was an aquarium.

Maybe that would have made everything better.

And it’s pretty hard to crap on an aquarium. I’m staring at the big one now and trying to figure out how little Gerald would have done that. Nearly impossible.

“Gerald?”

I look at them at the table and they are not Ashley, Nathan, and Hannah.

They are Snow White, Donald Duck, and Cinderella. I don’t want this to happen, so I say, “Yeah?”

“What do you think about it? Do you think she should be allowed to go back to that school after what she did?”

I’m staring at Ashley, who is asking this question, but she is Snow White, with that fucking bluebird on her shoulder.

“Gerald doesn’t watch TV,” Cinderella says.

“Righteous,” Donald Duck answers. He holds up his white wing for a high five. “That shit just makes you stupid anyway.”

I high-five his wing and can feel the feathers.

I reach down and pinch my leg, but no matter how hard I do it, I can’t snap myself out of Gersday.

Cinderella says, “Anyway, she only called in the bomb threat. It wasn’t like she planted a real bomb. She had every reason to blow the whole school up, as far as I’m concerned. They all treated her like shit.”

“That’s no reason to freak people out,” Donald Duck says.

“So freaking people out is now a crime?” Snow White says.

“Um, yeah,” Donald answers. “Bomb threats are illegal.”

I pinch my leg harder. I blink. I breathe in. Breathe out. I tap my foot. I dig my fingernails into my palm.

I am still sitting at the table with Snow White, Donald, and Cinderella. So I ask where the bathroom is and I lock the
door behind me and stare at myself in the mirror. I am not a Walt Disney character. I am Gerald.

I am Gerald and I will never be anyone but Gerald.

I splash my face with water and flush the toilet and I look at myself one more time and I do not want to punch Gerald. Violence seems so out of place here.

When I return to the kitchen, I am relieved to see Hannah, Nathan, and Ashley cleaning up. No webbed yellow feet and no gaudy ball gowns.

“You want the rest of this?” Nathan asks as he offers me some lo mein.

I accept and sit down and eat it out of the white carton with a fork. They talk excitedly about watching
Jaws
next—a Friday tradition. Hannah makes her way to the chair in front of the big saltwater tank and touches the glass where a starfish has attached itself. I sit next to her, on the arm of the chair.

“Does he have a name?” I ask.

“He’s an it. This species is hermaphroditic.” When I look clueless, she adds, “It creates sperm
and
eggs.”

“I know what hermaphroditic means. I just want to know its name,” I say.

“Oh, sorry,” she says. “I call it Sal. Could be short for Sally, you know?”

“Gotcha.”

We stare at Sal for a while and she tells me the names of the other fish. Harry, Sadie, Kingsley, Bob, and the big clown triggerfish named Bozo.

“Don’t they give you a feeling of hope?” she asks. “I mean, like one day we’ll be free?”

I fail to see how fish trapped in a two-hundred-gallon glass tank should give me hope. I would think freedom for Harry and Sadie and Bob and Bozo would look more like the ocean where they belong. I don’t say this. Instead, I say, “Free?”

“They have their own house. They have jobs. They have everything they want. They go on vacation in summer to Wildwood. It’s just—it’s just so much hope.”

“I thought we were talking about the fish,” I say.

“Oh.”

“But yeah. They do give me hope, I guess. They’re so nice,” I say. “Are they always this nice?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m not used to it,” I say. “Like I said in the car, you know?”

She stares at the fish and thinks for a minute. “Shit,” she says. “That thing I said about hermaphrodites. It was something like your mom would have said, wasn’t it?”

I laugh. It’s a real laugh. I check to make sure.

This makes her laugh, too.

“My mother probably doesn’t know what a hermaphrodite is. Not unless it was in some article in a magazine,” I say.

“You guys are missing the beginning,” Ashley says. “You can’t be here on a Friday and not watch
Jaws
. It’s a house rule. Even you, fish girl. Come on.”

Hannah and I sit in two different chairs. She sits where she can see her fish and the TV at the same time. I sit on the couch where I had my nap. Halfway through the movie—right when the shark starts chasing down Quint’s boat—Nathan
goes to the kitchen and brings back beers for all of us and we sit there mesmerized until the very end.

As the credits roll, Hannah says, “I want to be a marine biologist.”

“Hell yeah,” Nathan says. “Do it. You’d be really good at it.”

Ashley nods.

No one chuckles condescendingly and says
Marine biologist? Heh.

What occurs to me at this second is this: There is a huge world out there. I only know my dumb family and my dumb house and my dumb school and my dumb job. But there is a huge world out there… and most of it is underwater.

WHEN I DROP
Hannah off at her driveway, I tell her that I have an empty house for the night.

“Do you think it would be safe for me to come over?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Probably not.”

I demand to break rule #5.

I demand to kiss her today. Right now, even.

Then I lean in and kiss her on the mouth, and she parts my lips with her tongue and we break rule #5. For ten minutes.

I can’t explain the thoughts I have about her on my drive home, but they are pretty hot thoughts. But then I’m soft inside. Like I’m filled with nougat or crème caramel. I want to
tell someone.
I just broke rule #5. I am happy. I think I have a real girlfriend.

I have no one to share that with. I have no friends. Joe Jr. would think I was a prude, only kissing a girl at seventeen years old. Beth is not my friend, she’s my boss. No one in SPED class would care—or they’d just make dumb comments about it. Deirdre would make me feel bad because she’s probably never going to break rule #5 in her life.

There is only one person I want to call right now, and she lives in Scotland and she left me here in this fucking mess and never calls me. My nougat hardens. My crème caramel turns crunchy. Why am I mad at Lisi?
Why?
All she did was follow through. All she did was exactly what she said she would do. She got out.

And it’s not like I don’t have a phone. It’s not like I don’t have fingers to dial her new number. I could have dialed her number a hundred times if I wanted to. Only I didn’t because… what?

I thought I could do this alone.

I demand not to do this alone.

When I pass through the gate and wave to the security guard, he raises an eyebrow at me and I don’t know why until I see our driveway, which is packed with cars. Maybe twenty of them, from the garage all the way down the drive. The extras are scattered around the cul-de-sac.

I stop and open my car window and I hear the music twanging away, rattling the neighbors’ houses. I wonder how long this party’s been going on. And how soon the cops will come.

I demand to not be here when the cops come.

I park and walk up the front yard to the door and when I open the door, the first thing I do is take a picture of the scene with my phone and send it to Dad’s phone.

I make my way to the stairs, through the thick crowd of complete strangers in my house. Tasha is drunk. There are two kegs in the kitchen and a lot of bottles of liquor on the kitchen table. Some people are piled up on the couch making out. Others are dancing on the far side of the room where Danny has his stereo set up. I think one girl is dancing in her bra. I can’t figure out what to do.