The Boy Recession

by Flynn Meaney

  I reach out and touch the pin that’s glittering on his tie.

  “I thought I was gonna stab myself this whole time,” Hunter says. “But if you like it, I can get one for the tux….”

  “Cast photo!” Mrs. Martin shouts, and someone pulls Hunter away.

  All the cast members from the show go out onto the stage and try to get close enough so the whole huge group fits in the picture. The three leads—Hunter, Diva, and Amy—pose in the front with their arms around one another. For one of the pictures, Mrs. Martin yells out, “Girls, kiss him! Kiss Billy Flynn!” So in the next picture, Diva and Amy, on either side of Hunter, are each kissing him on the cheek.

  But seeing him with other girls is different this time. This time, I don’t feel jealous.

  CHAPTER 28: HUNTER

  “Aviva’s Sneak Peek: Your Preview of the Hottest Escorts in the Boy Binder”

  “The Boy Recession©” by Aviva Roth, The Julius Journal, April

  Yesterday was April Fools’ Day, so when Eugene called me up and asked me to come help lift up his boat, I thought he was screwing around. But here I am—Saturday, ten o’clock in the friggin’ morning, and I’m at the marina.

  The musical is over, so life is pretty much back to normal. Right after the show, things were different. My teachers congratulated me, and when my dad dropped me off in the morning, all these parents rolled down their windows and told me that I was an awesome Billy Flynn. And on the bulletin board in the main hallway, there were all these pictures of the cast. But then yesterday April rolled around, and they took the Chicago pictures down and put up this weird display that said: “A Parent’s Guide to Sniffing: Spring Allergies or Drug Use?” That’s how I knew my fifteen minutes of fame were up.

  So now I’m back to my normal stuff—driving around with Derek, Dave, and Damian, hanging out at the gas station, chilling out at my house, playing video games, sleeping in on weekends—except today. This morning Eugene was honking under my window at 9:45 AM, forcing me out of bed. He and Derek borrowed a truck from his neighbor to hitch up his old-ass rusty boat trailer.

  “How’d he get you to do this?” I ask Derek as we stand out on the dock, waiting for Eugene to start bossing us around.

  The wind off the lake is whipping through my pajama pants—yeah, I’m still wearing my pajamas. Derek’s got the hood of his sweatshirt up, and he’s trying to block the wind with his hand to light a cigarette. He fails, gives up, and chucks the thing into the water.

  “Promised me a hundred bucks,” Derek says. “What about you?”

  “He’s giving me some valuable advice,” I say, looking out at the water.

  “Stock tip?”

  I shake my head. “Nahhh.”

  Eugene backs the truck up as close to the dock as he can get. Then he stops it, hops out, and slams the door behind him.

  “Great spring day to be out on the water!” he says, coming at us and rubbing his hands together.

  “Yeah, gotta love the windchill,” I say. “Remember, I’ve kinda still got mono.”

  “You’ll be fine,” Eugene says. “This will be a piece of cake! I’ll be backing the truck up, and you guys make sure the trailer stays in the middle of the dock. Lemme know if I need to go left or right, and lemme know when I gotta stop. Once I stop, you guys unhitch the trailer. Then we get the boat off, slide that baby into the water, and, bada-bing, bada-boom, we’re floating.”

  The way Eugene explains it, it sounds easy and almost fun. But as soon as we get started, we realize it’s not easy or fun, and everything goes wrong. First Eugene reverses down the dock ramp at full speed, with Derek and me screaming at him, “Go right! Go right!” But of course he ignores us and doesn’t go right, and the boat trailer starts to careen off the side of the dock. Derek has to jump into the cold-ass lake to keep the boat on track.

  “Why the hell did you take this out of the water in the first place?” I ask Eugene as I struggle with the stupid rusty trailer hitch.

  “The lake can freeze over, Huntro!”

  “Everyone left their big yachts in there.”

  “If you leave your boat in the water, you have to winterize it,” Eugene says. Even though it’s his boat, he’s not helping us with the hitch. He’s standing at the top of the dock, “directing” us. “And I don’t know how to winterize a boat.”

  “You don’t know how to do this, either!” yells Derek, who’s trying to brace his wet sneakers against the slippery dock.

  I try to just grit my teeth and bear it, because Eugene has promised that the advice he’s going to give me is pretty important.

  “Okay, lay it on me,” I tell Eugene a half-hour later, when we’re out on the water. “Tell me how to be the perfect date.”

  We’re hanging out on the boat, and Eugene has rewarded us with beers and snacks. It’s actually not too cold now that the sun’s out, but the beer has so much ice on it I’m holding it with my sleeve instead of my hand. Derek’s lounging on the deck in the sun with a baseball hat over his face, drying off. He lifts his head up for a minute and squints at us to ask, “What is this? This is the advice you want?”

  “Huntro’s in love,” Eugene informs Derek, shutting the top of the cooler and sitting down next to me.

  “What? Nah,” I say, leaning my head back against the railing.

  “You are!” Eugene says. Then, to Derek, “He’s in love. You know when I knew? Sunday night, soon as he’s done the last show of Chicago, Hunter calls me up, asks me what a cummerbund is.”

  “Vegetable!” Derek guesses, like we’re playing a trivia game.

  We both ignore him.

  “I’m not in love, dude. I just didn’t know what a cummerbund was.”

  I’m not in love, but I’m totally pumped to go to the prom with Kelly. It’s kinda funny—when I thought I’d have to go with Diva, I was dreading wearing a nice suit and paying for the limo and taking a million pictures. But now that I’m going with Kelly, I want to get an awesome suit, and pay for the limo, and take a million pictures. I’m determined to be a kick-ass date. In fact, I’m so determined to be a kick-ass date that I’m gonna listen to Eugene’s advice, and take notes, and not make fun of him when he talks. That’s a big sacrifice for me.

  “The basic foundation of seduction is etiquette,” Eugene says, standing up, taking off his sunglasses, and putting them in his pocket.

  “Be a gentleman. When she walks in a room, you stand up. When she gets to a door, you open it. When she gets to a chair, you pull it out.”

  “Bullshit!” Derek calls out, his voice muffled by his hat. “Women can hold their own doors and pull out their own chairs. You’re a sexist pig, Eugene.”

  “I don’t give a crap how stupid Eugene sounds,” I say. “When it comes to this stuff, I’m listening to him.”

  “Why?”

  “Picture in your head what Bobbi looks like.”

  Derek lifts up his hat to show us that he’s smirking. “I often do.”

  “Watch your mouth!” Eugene warns.

  “Now, look at Eugene,” I instruct Derek, extending my hand toward the captain of the vessel. “Observe the sweater vest and the chubby little sausage fingers. And remember this amazing fact: He dumped her.”

  Derek sits up and pushes his hat back. “Okay,” he says. “I’m paying attention.”

  Eugene sits down to continue his lecture.

  “A big romantic gesture can do a lot,” he says. “And if it’s a surprise big romantic gesture, you get double points. Like, Bobbi and I were going through her family photo album, and she showed me this necklace her grandpa gave her grandma after they came to America. I had a jeweler re-create it. But with a bigger stone, of course,” Eugene adds proudly.

  “Hold up,” I say. “I don’t have any money. I have, like, eight dollars in an empty pretzel tub.”

  “It’s not about the money, Huntro,” Eugene says, stepping over a bunch of ropes to go fix one of the sails. “It’s about doing something personal, something that
means something to the girl. What does Kelly like?”

  I’m drinking from my Heineken, and I shrug.

  “I dunno. She likes everything, I think. She’s not Diva, so she’s actually a nice person…. I dunno, music?”

  “Okay, okay,” Eugene says thoughtfully. “We can work with that. Lemme ruminate.”

  “Man, Huntro, I’m glad our prom dates are friends,” Derek says. “We get to ride in the same limo.”

  I look over at Eugene and raise my eyebrows. Eugene, who’s folding his handkerchief, just shakes his head.

  “Uh… dude?” I say to Derek. “I thought Darcy turned you down.”

  “I’m gonna win her over,” Derek says, standing up and resting his arm on the railing, totally confident. “Don’t worry. She’ll be my date.”

  “You gonna hold some doors and give her a necklace?”

  Derek shakes his head. “I’m gonna tell her she has to bring me, to save me from a life of prostitution.”

  “What?”

  “What? It’s true, right?” Derek appeals to Eugene. “If I don’t have a date, you’re gonna force me into prostitution, right?”

  “It’s not prostitution!” Eugene says. “But yeah, I’d probably recruit you.”

  “See?” Derek says to me.

  “What about you, gingerbread boy? You got a date? Or are you full-time pimp for the night?”

  “Full-time pimp,” Eugene says, sighing. “But I found out Bobbi was going alone. She and Diva are doing the independent-women thing. I should have asked her.”

  “You dumped her!” Derek says.

  “We’re still friends. And I think I miss her, guys. I do miss her. I do.”

  “Of course you do,” Derek says. “You invested a crapload of money in her. I mean, that necklace?” He whistles.

  “No, not the necklace,” Eugene says. “I don’t care about the money. I mean, I’m trying to expense it on my tax return, but I don’t care about the money. Or the promise-ring thing. I miss her. I miss hanging out with her. I was so comfortable with her. I could be myself.”

  “Your greedy, greasy self,” I say, grinning.

  But Eugene’s words get me thinking. I was so comfortable with her. I could be myself. It actually reminds me of the song I wrote. As soon as I realize that, a plan for a romantic gesture starts forming in my head.

  “Yo, Derek!” I call out.

  While I was spacing out, Derek climbed onto the dock to tie up the boat. When he looks at me, I ask him, “You think you and the D-Bags could actually learn to play some music?”

  CHAPTER 29: KELLY

  “Faux-Feminists Burn Bras, Boycott Prom”

  “The Boy Recession©” by Aviva Roth, The Julius Journal, April

  So the first-wave feminists were all about legal rights,” Diva says. “They wanted to be allowed to vote, so they went around with these axes, smashing up all the bars. At the end of the night, it looked like an episode of Bad Girls Club. Does anyone watch that, on Oxygen? Oxygen is a feminist television network, by the way. So is Oprah’s channel.

  “So anyway, the reason we get to vote is because of these women called suffragettes. The most famous suffragette was the mom from Mary Poppins. She showed us the true meaning of feminism by leaving her children behind and forgetting about them so she could go out and do political stuff….”

  It’s the second week in April, and I’m sitting through Diva’s U.S. history oral report on the Women’s Rights Movement. Somehow, while I was in bed with mono, our class covered everything from the Great Depression to Reaganomics. Now I have to catch up, because our AP test is only a month away. These presentations we’re doing this week are bearable only because there’s finally sun coming through the classroom windows and it’s warm enough that I’m not wearing a turtleneck sweater.

  “What’s the deal with this?” I whisper to Darcy, leaning across the aisle. “She’s not making any sense, but she seems really into it.”

  You know that a presentation is bad when even Darcy isn’t taking notes. She’s sorting her pencils by size and color.

  “She thinks she’s a feminist,” Darcy tells me. “It’s her new obsession. She’s moved on from hating you.”

  “… So when the third wave came around, all these women from different races and countries came together and were working together. It was all about cooperation. Although some women were still petty and jealous, and would steal each other’s boyfriends.”

  At this point, Diva stops and stares pointedly at me.

  “Hasn’t moved on completely,” Darcy amends.

  The bell finally rings, and Darcy and I pack up our bags and wait for Aviva to collect all her layers—her scarf, her sweater, her leather jacket. Even in spring, Aviva piles on more clothes than an Ellis Island immigrant.

  “Are we going to Derek’s party?” Aviva asks as she puts on her sunglasses and follows us out of the classroom. “Eugene’s gonna bring the boy binder, and I need help picking out a photogenic prostitute.”

  “Hunter asked me to go,” I say, stopping at my locker.

  “Ooooh,” Aviva coos. “Is it, like, a date?”

  “I don’t think so,” I say.

  “What’s the deal with you guys?” Darcy asks. “Are you together?”

  “I don’t think so.” I shut my locker, turn around, and sigh. “I don’t know what’s going on. Hunter’s been really weird since I asked him to prom.”

  “Like, asshole weird?” Darcy says, immediately suspicious.

  “No! The opposite. He’s weirdly nice. He doesn’t make fun of me anymore. And yesterday, when I walked into PMS, he stood up.”

  “He stood up?”

  “Like, he stood up because I walked in the room,” I say. “Like I was the queen or something.”

  “Lucky,” Darcy says. She thinks everyone should stand when she walks in a room because she’s school president.

  It’s not lucky, though. It’s awkward. Hunter has been so polite, timid, and boring. He’s acting like Johann! And when I’m in PMS with Hunter and Johann, and Hunter is acting like Johann, and Johann is acting like Johann, everyone is quiet and polite. It’s driving me crazy.

  “Maybe he’s confused about what your status is,” Aviva says. “Does he think you’re going to the prom as friends? Some girls ask guys, and then say, ‘Let’s go as friends.’ ”

  “I didn’t say we were going as friends.” I lower my voice, because we’re getting closer to pre-calc, and Hunter is in our class.

  “If you didn’t mention it either way, maybe he’s unclear,” Aviva suggests.

  “Well, what was I supposed to say? What’s the opposite of going as friends? Was I supposed to ask, ‘Do you wanna go to the prom… as lovers?’ ”

  But I shut up just in time, because Hunter is waiting outside our pre-calc classroom.

  “Hey, Kell,” he says. “Do you need to copy the homework? I did it last night. All of it.”

  “You did all the homework?” I ask, as Aviva and Darcy look from me to Hunter, smiling. “But you usually copy my homework.”

  When we all go inside, I pull on Aviva’s arm and whisper in her ear, “See? He did his homework! He’s definitely being weird.”

  Derek’s parents are letting him have a party because, as of tomorrow, he hasn’t had to go to the emergency room in six months, which is a long time for him. The party is in Derek’s backyard, which is huge, with a swing set, a tree house, and a deck full of rusty lawn chairs. Derek’s backyard is a lot like Derek himself—it’s fun, it’s messy, and it catches on fire sometimes. Like right now.

  “This bonfire is not properly contained,” Darcy says when we come around the deck and see the big, leaping flames and the smoke.

  “Do you know if Derek has a license for this? Or buckets of water? Where is the so-called host?”

  Darcy stomps off to find Derek, and soon Aviva leaves me, too.

  “There’s Eugene with the boy binder,” she says excitedly. “Here, hold my scarf.”

&nb
sp; This isn’t a big party like homecoming. Derek just invited people he’s friends with—Dave, Damian, and a few other guys, who are fighting over whether or not to put more wood on the fire, and coughing a lot from all the smoke—and a bunch of girls. Pam and Amy took two of the rusted chairs up on the deck and, sitting in them like they’re thrones, are whispering to each other about everyone down below. There are junior spandexers on one side of the fire, all texting, and sophomores fighting over a bag of marshmallows, and freshmen at the edge of the woods, hunting for sticks to put the marshmallows on.

  Just as I look up at the tree house, Hunter comes out of it. When he sees me, he stops, gripping the sides of the open doorway, and grins. Then he clambers down the wood ladder and jumps off four rungs before the bottom.

  “Hey! You’re here! I’m glad you’re here!”

  When Hunter runs up to me, I’m happy that he’s not awkward and polite anymore, and I also wonder if he’s a little bit drunk. When he hugs me, I think he smells like beer, but I’m not sure.

  “How’s it going? Did you help make the fire? It’s huge!” I say.

  “Derek was the one building it up bigger,” Hunter says. “And Damian was the one trying to contain it. So it’s been kind of a balancing act.”

  “I think Derek’s winning out,” I say, watching sparks shoot up from the fire.

  “Yeah, it’s getting pretty scary over there,” Hunter says.

  Typical Hunter, he hops up onto the railing of the deck and balances there, swinging his legs. He beckons me closer.

  “C’mere,” he says. “I’ll protect you if the fire gets out of hand.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I lean on the railing, next to Hunter’s legs. “You remember how to stop, drop, and roll?”

  “Uh… not really,” Hunter says, laughing and shaking his head. His hair is growing out—now it’s long enough to fall across his eyebrows but not to cover his eyes. That’s the perfect length.

  “But we’re all good, ’cause Derek’s mom is a volunteer firefighter.”

  “Really?”