Reality Boy (3 page)

Before I walk to the parking lot, I go into the room next door—an abandoned warehouse room that used to have a mail-order business in it. When I started coming here, the company was still operating. Now all that’s left is the shelving units and the little cubicles from the offices.

It’s dark.

I walk in fast toward one of the cubicle walls. It’s the only drywall in the whole redbrick place. Then I slam my fist through it, but that isn’t enough, so I pound another hole, too, lower down because I’m starting to run out of space.

My hand stings and my knuckle is bleeding, but it feels good. When I stand back, I count the holes. Forty-two.

By the time I get home from boxing-not-boxing, Dad is long gone to his Sunday open houses and Mom is showered after her usual two-hour Sunday-morning walk and is in the kitchen, doing kitchen-y things. She loves doing kitchen-y things. If my mom had her way, she would live in the kitchen and everything would be happy. And if it wasn’t happy, she’d whip up a batch of something and then it
would
be happy. Or she’d just walk more. You pick.

After I take a shower, I sit down and she puts a plate of breakfast in front of me. Scrambled eggs, turkey bacon, and a glass of water. Mom has a new centerpiece and it reminds me of Nanny. I must have crapped on this table ten times, easy. Maybe more.

“Did you have a good workout?” Mom asks.

“Yeah. I’m getting really fast on the speed bag. I love that thing.”

“Good for you,” she says. In a good way.

“Yeah.”

“I’m glad you found that gym,” she adds. “I never knew it was there.”

Mom puts her fork on the edge of her plate and downs a handful of some weird pills—supplements and vitamins and whatever chronic power walkers eat to make them not disappear into thin air. I’d say at five foot two, she’s now easily under a hundred pounds.

“I’m heading out to do some early Christmas shopping today,” she says. “Dad will be back around four. Any chance we’ll see you for dinner?”

Right when I’m about to answer, the rhythmic sound starts in the basement.
Ba-bang-ba-boom-ba-bang-ba-boom.
Mom automatically gets up, runs the water in the sink full blast, loads the dishwasher, and then starts it, although it isn’t even half-full.

“Nah. Double shift today. Won’t be home until after the hockey game. Probably as late as ten. I’ll catch dinner there.” I look at the clock. It’s ten thirty. I have to be at the PEC Center at eleven. “Shit. I’d better go now.”

A few years ago, if I’d said
shit
so casually in front of my mother, she might have scolded me about my language. Now she says nothing. I’m not even sure if she heard me over the dishwasher and the
ba-bang-ba-boom-ba-bang-ba-boom
.

“Leave your plate. I’ll get it,” she says. “Have a great day.”

“Thanks. You too.”

Isn’t it sweet? Isn’t it lovely what Nanny did for us? Eleven years ago, my mother was cleaning up my crap from that same table. Now she offers to clear my plate because she knows I have to get to work on time. How polite and thoughtful we all are! What acceptable
behay-vyah
.

THERE’S THIS GIRL.

She usually works register #1, and I like it that way because I always work #7 and she’s far away from me and I don’t have to nervously squeeze past her to get to the kids’ meal boxes or the candy. We have to do a lot of squeezing in stand five because there’s only about four feet between the counter and the hot tables where the cooks put all the food we have to serve up.

Anyway, for the matinee, she’s at #4 because the stand is half-closed, and I have to squeeze past her twice to get stuff. She smells nice and her hair looks soft. I know… this is the shit I will think about when I’m locked up one day.

She’s only been working here for a few weeks. Regular hours like me, but not always in my stand. She disappears a lot and I see her at break time in the smokers’ alley, writing in a little book that she keeps in her pocket. She looks at me sometimes. She’s caught me looking at her twice, but I’ve looked at her a lot more than that, because there’s something about her. The way she wears her hair. The way she wears boys’ combat pants to work even though Beth has asked her not to. The way she writes in that little book. She’s beautiful—but not in that Nanny-starlet way where she cares about how she looks. She’s the opposite. She doesn’t care at all, which makes her even more beautiful. If I was a normal kid, I’d ask her out, I guess.

But Roger, my anger management coach, told me that dating and anger management don’t go very well together. He told me that girls are infuriating. They always want to
know
so much.
Relationships make you think you deserve things, Gerald. Deserving leads to resentment. Girls think you should be doing things for them, too. The rules are blurry. You’re doing so well.

The matinee at PEC is some singing group for kids. By the time we open and the little kids come in, the only things we’re really selling are pretzels, bottled water, and the occasional pack of red licorice. It’s slow. Most of the parents are well dressed and make their children say thank you. Here’s an example:

“What do you say to the nice man?” they say.

“Thank you,” the kid says when I hand him his dollar in change.

“You should say it more nicely, Jordan,” his mother says.

“Thank you,” the kid says, no differently than before.

I hand him his pretzel and he sneers at me because he thinks I’m some sublevel adult who can’t get a better job than concessions at the PEC Center. I hate parents like his. So concerned with appearances. I want to tell them that they’re lucky the kid isn’t taking dumps on their favorite couch. Or in their BMW.

After the preshow rush, I get to peek into the arena. Four guys dressed in different costumes—a cowboy, a railroad engineer, a suit, and a chef—play songs that use the same chords over and over again. The chef plays drums with cooking utensils. The cowboy occasionally drops the melody and takes off on a country music riff all by himself while the other guys roll their eyes. Then he hops on his guitar and rides it around the stage. The kids can’t get enough of this. The high-pitched screaming makes my ears crackle.

“That’s messed up,” she says. It’s the girl from register #1. “How can anyone even think that’s funny?”

“I know, right?” I say. Then I walk away because she’s irresistible, and I am on a mission to resist her.

I refill the cooler with bottled water and diet soda. I go to the bathroom to pee, and wash my hands exactly as an employee is supposed to. When I come out, she’s nowhere to be found. Probably out writing about me in her little book. About how she tried to talk to the Crapper, but he walked away.

“GERALD?”

It’s my manager, Beth. I look at her.

“Gerald, you’ve been standing there staring into space for five minutes.”

I look at the clock. I see the well-dressed parents taking their overexcited kids to the souvenir stand for cowboy/engineer/suit/chef costumes and kites and cups and T-shirts. We’ve closed our gate so we can count our drawers and switch up for the hockey crowd. I’ve already counted my drawer. I don’t remember doing it, but it’s done. I notice that Beth looks worried. As worried as Beth can look, anyway—she’s so laid-back she’s nearly horizontal. But still, she looks worried.

“Sorry,” I say.

“You can take a break if you want,” she says. “You’ve been here since we opened. And did you even eat lunch yet?” I’d like Beth to be my mother. She totally wouldn’t let Tasha live in the basement with her rat-boyfriend sleepovers. “I have leftover chicken and fries if you want some,” she adds, and points to the shallow stainless-steel tray under the heat lamp full of fried foods that never got sold.

As I reach in, Register #1 Girl reaches in, too, and our wrists brush against each other. I look at her and smile. She smiles back and takes her hand out to give me first pick. I do the same. Beth intervenes and fixes us each a paper dish of chicken fingers and fries, and we thank her. And then I go way back toward register #7 to eat, and Register #1 Girl goes to where everyone else is eating, over by the sinks beyond register #1.

I go back to my other day. The one I was living in my head when Beth snapped me out of it. My place-of-no-triggers. I invented it when I was little, thanks to Nanny. I call it Gersday. It rhymes with pairsday or daresday. It’s the extra day I get inside of a week that no one else knows about. I live it in little parts of those other, regular days like Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, et cetera. While normal people who have seven days in their week may think I’m spacing out or “off in la-la land,” as my asshole third-grade teacher used to say, I’m really living one more day than all of you. A good day.

All Gersdays are good days.

Let me repeat. All Gersdays are good days.

The postal abbreviation is GD. For Gersday. Or good day. Or anything you want to make it, as long as it’s so good that all the bad goes away. The zip code is
.