The Worst Years of Your Life (26 page)

“You want to come over to my house, or do you want to do it at yours?” Peter asks me, like he doesn't care.

“Yours,” I say too quickly.

“Don't call me Disco Fag at my house.”

“I won't,” I say. “Phil invented it.”

“Bring your skateboard,” he says, then we both shut up because Mr. Thone starts lecturing about plants again. Everyone pays attention in Mr. Thone's class because he failed eleven kids last year. They all had to go to summer school at Amphi High School, and one kid got stabbed in the arm by a nineteen-year-old from Nogales.

I
SIT
on the edge of the drained pool, my legs dangling over the cracked tiles. Peter pulls off 180s pretty high on the walls. He sticks his tongue out a little as he concentrates. I feel like a loser because it's my skateboard he's using, and I suck at it. I can't even go like a foot up the wall without bailing.

Just as I notice my legs are getting sunburned, Peter announces we should work on the project. As we walk toward a metal gate, he trips on a rotten cushion from a pool chair, hits the cement deck pretty hard, flat on his face. My skateboard flies back into the pool. I reach down and grab his arm to help him up, asking if he's all right, but he just looks at me like he wants to kill me and shakes my hand from his arm.

Peter stands by himself and lifts his shirt to check out the skinned part of his chest and stomach. He has a line of brown curly hair leading from his belly button into his shorts. I don't.

“Shit,” he says, now looking at his bleeding elbow. “Sorry about your board.” He jumps into the low end to get it for me.

It's hotter in Peter's kitchen than it is outside, and it smells like vitamins. He grabs a handful of fake cheap-brand Froot Loops called Fruit Circles from an open box on the counter and doesn't offer me any. As we walk upstairs to his room, I ask, “Did you ever learn that head thing?”

“What?” he says, crunching the cereal.

“The scalp fortune-telling thing.”

“No,” he says. “I mean yes.” He doesn't say he'll do it on me, and I don't ask.

There are tons of clothes on Peter's bed, his dresser is missing a drawer, and his window has a crack in it that someone tried to fix with masking tape. Two porno magazines in the middle of his floor are opened to close-up pictures of wet pink and purple pussies. Peter sees me looking down at them, and he grabs one. He flips it open to a picture of a black guy getting a blow job from a chubby blonde woman who has her hands bound behind her back with electrical tape. Her eyes are rolled white like she might throw up. The black man's dick is big and veiny and his balls hang low. The woman wants out of there, I can tell. Like, maybe she was kidnapped and forced to suck his dick. She looks like my mother's friend Linda, who used to babysit my brother and me until she moved to Flagstaff to get away from her ex-husband who was a stalker. I feel myself getting hard, and I feel bad, try to think of something horrible, like rotten food or a smashed jackrabbit on the side of the road, but it doesn't work. It never works.

“You think Samuel's dick is this big?” Peter asks me.

“I don't care,” I say. Samuel is one of four black kids in our whole school. “That's gross.”

“We can see at camp in April,” Peter says, smiling like he's excited. “We all have to take showers together.”

“I know.” The whole seventh grade goes to Y Camp in Oracle for three nights. Last year, when they came back, they started to call Brad Diaz a donkey because his dick was so big. Lots of girls got felt up, two got fingered. I plan on eating tons of cereal and making myself barf the night before we're supposed to go. I'll make sure my mother and brother hear me so they know it's real and I'll pretend that I'm really disappointed that I can't go. I can't take showers with other guys. I know that.

Peter shoves some clothes aside and sits on his bed, continues to flip through the magazine. “I touched Lacy's pussy,” he says. “She let me. She has tons of hair.”

I pretend to be interested in a map of the Grand Canyon tacked up next to Peter's window. I walk over to the map so he can't see my boner. “When are we going to start the project? Do you still even have the beans?” I ask.

“One more thing,” Peter says, then he jumps up from his bed and reaches under his dresser. He pulls out a dirty baseball hat with “Thunderbird” on the front in gold thread. “You know where I got this?”

“Where?” I ask.

“From the dead lady,” he says. He puts it on his head, adjusts it. “Before I told anyone about her, I grabbed it and stuffed it in my backpack.”

He tried to put it on my head, but I swat it away.

“You chicken?” he asks. He picks it up from the floor and steps really close to me like he might want to fight. He looks right into my eyes. His eyes are light brown, the color of butterscotch.

“She might have had lice,” I say, smiling on purpose like I'm sort of joking, even though I'm not. “Or a disease.” I imagine tons of bugs pouring out of her crusty eye sockets, some of them laying eggs in the hat. My boner still won't go away.

“Chicken,” Peter says. “Craig is chicken, Craig is a chicken….” His face is so close to mine that I can feel his breath on my lips, see a few tiny hairs between his eyebrows. I smell the fruity cereal he ate, and I wish I had remembered to have a piece of gum. Our breaths mix in the tiny space between our mouths, and I can't move.

“I'm not” is the only thing I can say. My face is hot and my eyes close by themselves.

“All right,” Peter finally says, and I open my eyes. “You don't have to wear it.” He flings the hat across the room. “I don't know why you have to be such a baby, and I don't know why you had to close your eyes like that.”

Peter puts both his hands on my head and presses on my scalp with his fingertips, tracing tiny circles. I smell the cereal again as he moves his hands down to my face, pushing my cowlick flat and stopping on my cheeks. “God,” he says loudly, dropping his hands from my face. He's angry. “And don't tell Lacy or any of the other girls about the magazines.”

I swallow, then say, “I won't.”

P
ETER'S ON THE NEWS
for a second time because the police found two more dead homeless women. Steve Fogleman interviews him again and Peter says, “I hope the police catch the person who killed them.” Steve Fogleman squeezes Peter's shoulder and calls him “brave.”

L
ACY'S WEARING
the dead lady's Thunderbird cap on Monday. It matches her purple Izod like she planned her outfit. Under the lights of the hallway, the hat looks even dirtier—there are white lines of salt from the dead lady's sweat. Lacy and Peter walk by me and whisper to each other and laugh.

Before pre-algebra I tell Jay that Lacy's wearing the dead lady's hat. “Peter stole it,” I add when Jay doesn't say anything.

“Duh,” Jay says. “They were talking about it on the bus this morning.” Jay sits at his desk. “They were talking about something else, too, homo,” Jay says.

My stomach falls, like I'm jumping my bike or I'm suddenly starving. “What?”

“Peter said you wanted to look at Samuel's dick at Y Camp,” Jay says loudly so everyone can hear. “In the showers.”

“Peter said that, not me. I swear to God.”

Wanda, a girl who wore the same yellow shirt nine days in a row and has tons of white zits on her forehead, looks over. “Are you gay?” she asks me. “Just admit it.” She sometimes smells like concentrated urine and someone said they saw her mother in line for government cheese downtown. “Are you?”

“Peter also said you bet Samuel's dick was really long and you were afraid to wear the dead lady's hat,” Jay says.

“I didn't want to get lice or anything,” I say.

The bell rings and Mr. Dunn tells us to settle down and begins to take roll.

I write Jay a note:
I didn't say that about Samuel. I swear to God. And the hat is probably police evidence.

He doesn't even unfold it, and it falls on the floor when the bell rings for next period. I haven't heard a word Mr. Dunn has said or watched him do any problems on the board in the last forty-five minutes. I don't even care that I'll probably flunk the quiz on Friday.

Kim Fenster and some of her friends bust up to me in the hall. Kim's wearing the Thunderbird hat now, and she stands in front of me with her hands on her hips like she wants to block my way. “You're a pervert,” she says. “And you're prejudice and I'm telling Samuel you said you wanted to look at his dick.” She has a big wad of pink gum in her mouth, packed into her cheek.

“I didn't say anything,” I tell her. “I swear to God.”

“Peter said you'd probably lie about it because he said you were all embarrassed after you said it.” I've never seen Kim fight anyone—girls or boys—but I bet she'd win. Her concert T-shirt today is Alice Cooper's
Madhouse Rock.
It has a picture of Alice screaming and a splattered blood background. Alice's makeup drips off his face.

“Peter said his dad was runner-up to be an astronaut, which is a total lie,” I say. I notice then that Kim has hairy arms. Almost like a man. Way hairier than mine.

“You're gay and you want to see Samuel's dick,” she says.

“Peter said it, not me,” I say. She has hairy ape arms. I wonder why no one has ever made fun of her for them.
Ape arms, ape arms….

“In case you haven't noticed, Peter has a girlfriend,” she says. Some of her friends giggle. “Duh.”

I leave school, cut through the faculty parking lot. No one sees me. I don't have any money, so I can't drop a McNugget in the fountain. I play the display video games at Sears again, but after a few minutes a lady whose Sears name tag says
Mrs. Wilson
asks me if I need any help, but I know she really just wants me to leave. I tell her that I don't need any help and she says, “It's only 1:20. Why aren't you in school?”

“I go to private school,” I lie.

“Which one?”

“Salpointe Catholic.”

“Salpointe's a high school,” Mrs. Wilson says. Her glasses make her eyes look small.

“I know,” I say. “I go there.” I pretend to concentrate on the game more than I actually do, just so I don't have to look at her any longer. It's Space Invaders, the same patterns of missiles set after set. I could play for hours without losing a ship. I could play with my eyes closed.

“I don't believe you're in high school, and I don't believe that Salpointe has the day off.”

“I'm a freshman,” I say, thinking that I might start crying. I'm not even sure why. My throat bunches up, and I try to swallow it down.

“I can call security,” she threatens. “You can't just hang out here all day. That's called loitering and it's illegal.”

I drop the joystick and walk out, not looking back at her, the Sears Bitch. I could walk to the other end of the mall and play the display games at JCPenney's, but I don't. I hurry through, past two fat security guards, who don't even look at me. The mall is full of old ladies and men who wear windbreakers and ball caps and ugly walking shoes. They just walk around the mall all day, doing nothing. One couple wears matching purple outfits, which reminds me of the Thunderbird hat. I wonder if one of the old men I pass is the murderer. Any of them could be. I imagine that I solve the mystery, report the murderer. I'd be on the news a lot more than Peter. Steve Fogleman would interview me, call me a hero, and invite me over to his condo to hang out. We'd sit on his sofa and watch videos and eat burritos. Steve would kiss me and his mustache would tickle.

I rush out of the cool mall into a wall of heat, the white sun so bright I can't see for a minute, then I sort of jog across the parking lot toward the riverbed. It's too early to go home, so I sit on top of a knocked-over cement trash can behind Sunset Sports and read
Never Cry Wolf.

After a minute, I notice a skinny man sitting in his truck about twenty feet away. He's chewing on a toothpick and he has his radio tuned to 13K-HIT, which is playing a stupid song by Toto that goes on forever. When I look up at him again, he nods and smiles, so I put the book in my backpack and start to walk away. Then he turns down his radio and loudly asks, “Do you like
Playboy
?”

I begin to run along the riverbed, thinking the guy was planning on abducting me. I'm not stupid. Even if he had asked if I liked
Playgirl,
I wouldn't have gone near his truck. I run faster, my mouth dry, my neck burning in the afternoon sun. Even if the guy had been handsome and not wearing his shirt and asked if I liked
Playgirl,
I wouldn't have gone near his truck. I decide the only way I would have walked over to his truck is if the guy was handsome, not wearing a shirt, offered
Playgirl,
and was someone I already knew, like if he was my mother's boyfriend, and he really liked me more than he liked my mother. Like, he was only dating my mother so he could be near me. We'd have to break it to my mother eventually, but we'd have a secret relationship for a few months. The guy would pick me up at school, and we'd go over to his giant house in the foothills, and we'd mess around. Every day. And I'd tell my mother I was on the soccer team and that's why I couldn't get home until later.