by M. Billiter
After attaching the coupling to the end of the pipe, I slid the Styrofoam ring midway down the pipe until it was positioned just above where I’d secure the laser pointer. I carefully wrapped the white PVC pipe and Styrofoam dart holder in black electrical tape. A red zip tie secured the laser pointer in place. All that was left to make were the darts.
I placed a nail in the corner of a sticky note and rolled the paper until it created a funnel top. I trimmed the excess paper so each nail had a coned top, which would catch air better. I secured the cone in place with glue, then repeated this process with more than a dozen nails.
I stuck the makeshift darts into the Styrofoam holder, which made them easier to grab.
I was ready for a practice shot.
I glanced around my apartment. Bonita’s tail swayed from behind the blinds.
For better accuracy, I sighted the red laser on her tail. I quietly pushed a nail into the coupler of the pipe so that when I blew, air would fill the paper cone and send the nail dart soaring toward my target.
I sealed my lips around the pipe and blew hard. The nail dinged Bonita, who screamed and darted away, but it didn’t pierce her the way I’d hoped.
Maybe I needed sharper nails.
“No!”
David’s voice was strong today.
“You just need to blow harder.”
The joke was on the tip of my tongue, but I could tell he wasn’t in a playful mood.
“Listen, that professor of yours is a real asshole. People like that need to disappear.”
“This dart gun won’t kill them,” I said to him.
“But in the right spot, it could definitely scar them.”
His voice was louder than mine lately.
“Get ’em in the eye or throat. Try again.”
This time I filled my lungs with air, sealed my mouth even tighter around the coupling, and blew hard. The nail zipped through the air and into the wall.
“Nice.”
Thanks. But how do you expect me to pull this off?
I searched my apartment for my cat, but Bonita was nowhere to be found.
The only way it could possibly work was if I sat in the middle of the class surrounded by other students. I couldn’t separate from the herd. But even then, how the fuck was this going to work?
“Every Monday they show a TED Talk. When the intro music for it starts and the professor is still at the front of the classroom, pull the dart gun out of your backpack.”
Right. The music should drown the sound of me blowing into the pipe. And hopefully in the darkened room, no one would notice.
“Aim for the throat or the eye. Leave a mark.”
Don’t you think that’s a little harsh?
“Don’t be a pussy. Do you think that jerk deserves mercy?”
No, they don’t.
I packed my backpack for class, carefully tucking my dart gun into the front pocket. I just wanted to scare them. Nothing harmful, just a little zap to tell the blowhard who was really in charge.
Sundays usually sucked, but now I couldn’t wait for the night to end so the fun could begin.
21
Branson
The soundtrack for Titanic played from the apartment across from the hall. For once the heater worked in November, but it worked too well. When the windows in my apartment started to steam, I opened the door. It was Sunday night, and I missed Hope. We spent the Sunday together until I had to drive back for Monday classes. She told me she didn’t like to be alone, so next semester I’d only take Tuesday-Thursday classes so I could spend Sunday night with her. Or maybe I could take my last semester online. There was something about Hope that made me want to reach the finish line for college as quickly as possible. The sooner I did, the sooner I could be with her on a full-time basis and not this weekends-only bullshit. Until then I was stuck in Casper while Hope was in Cheyenne.
The end of a weekend was universally felt on campus. I learned early on that in this apartment complex, whatever hookups happened on Friday were either fizzling or reaching new heights by this point. From the sickeningly slow beat of “My Heart Will Go On” and its melodramatic lyrics, it sounded like things were on a high note for my neighbor. I had two choices: suffer through the kill-me-now music or drop my last ten pounds through sweat.
Bob from the Depression Center would probably want to move into the building if he knew how scorching they kept the apartments. We now Snapchatted, and anytime his story popped up on my phone, I laughed. The cat was funny as hell and painfully honest.
I grabbed my phone, slid down the side of the couch facing the front door and the only notable breeze, and called Aaron.
“Jeffrey,” he answered.
“Fucker.” I shook my head and was pretty sure sweat flung from my scalp. “It’s Africa hot in here.”
“Stop your whining. Least you don’t have to pay for heat,” he said. “I just got my electric bill, and it was sixty bucks. Can you believe that shit?”
“What? Is sixty a lot for heat?” I honestly didn’t know.
“Sure, if it was for a month’s worth of heat, that’d be awesome, but this was for last month’s air conditioning, and I only had the AC on for a few days.”
“That’s a bummer.”
“Yeah, I’m going to see if Mom can help me out.”
“Dude, you’re joking, right?” I said with a laugh. “Mom’s got a lot going on right now. Hope and I brought her soup last time I was in town. The chemo’s hitting her hard.”
“Yeah, I know. I talk to her. But I’m not getting paid shit on or off campus. I’m making $8.50 an hour at three different jobs.”
“Three jobs? I thought you worked at the library and the grocery store. Did you get another job?” I asked.
“No. Well, yeah, kind of. It’s my internship at the nonprofit.”
“How’s that going?” I stretched my legs, and the sweat under my knees left a watermark on the carpet.
“It’s a shit show. Our building homes event is our biggest deal of the year, and my executive board is a joke.”
“Executive board? Are they paid?”
Aaron blew a raspberry into the receiver. “No, they’re not paid, and neither am I.”
“Then why do it?” It seemed obvious to me—no pay, no work.
“Bran, it’s good on a résumé. I’m the president of the executive board that helps build homes. What sucks is the other people on the board. They’re total morons. I’ll say, ‘Hey, do this,’ and they need step-by-step directions. So I’ll ask them to do the simplest job, like get twelve dozen bagels for the build. Not hard. Or go get hot water from the student union so we can have bagels and coffee for our volunteer home builders. But instead of doing it, I get a text from Mike at six thirty that he couldn’t get the water and the union closes at seven. So I had to go all the way back to the union and get the water for these massive coffeepots. Then fuckin’ Jill brings nine dozen bagels, not twelve, nine. And then our finance chair, Jayla, didn’t print the Excel sheets that listed what all the volunteers were doing that night.”
“Quit,” I said. “That’s bullshit. Just quit.”
“You can’t quit a volunteer job. Besides, I’ve worked too hard this semester to have it fall apart now. But I want to say, ‘Do you guys even give a shit?’”
“When’s it over? Your term,” I said.
“We have one more house build before Christmas, and then I’m finished.”
“And then what, you’re just done?”
“Then the vice chair, Chad, who’s a total cunt, takes over in January. This guy can’t even come to our mandatory exec meetings but has his dad, who’s the vice president of the bank and a college alum, email me because I gave his kid a hard time for not making the meetings. His father’s a cunt too.”
“Bro, you’re making my head hurt with all this shit.”
It was good to hear my brother laugh. He always took things so seriously.
“Nah, it’s fine. I mean, none of t
hem got me their transition guides, and I’m like good luck running it next semester. Fuck you. If they all died, I’d be at the funeral doing a tap dance on their coffins.”
The next thing I heard was the sound of rapping on a table.
“I’d just tap the shit outta their coffins,” he said after he concluded his impromptu tap. “Buh-bye, suckers.”
The change in his voice along with the tapping made me laugh even more.
“So if anyone were to ask you in a job interview, ‘How was your home building experience?’ how’d you respond?” I asked, knowing Aaron would deliver something funny.
“Fuck. That. Shit.” He laughed again. “Let everyone go homeless. It’s easier.”
I chuckled.
“And what really gets me is that everyone on the board is like ‘You complain too much.’ And all I can think is ‘You want to be in my shoes for a day?’ I swear to God, Branson, you’d punch someone. But thankfully I’m almost finished with this semester.”
“I wouldn’t be messed up in that volunteer bullshit to begin with,” I said, and we both started snickering all over again.
“Bro, I’m not kidding you, this semester I had a permanent twitch. When people would say, ‘How’s it going?’ I’d go, ‘Uh, yeah, really good.” The shift in his voice was funny as hell.
If I wasn’t already sitting on the floor, my side-splitting laughter would’ve had me there in a heartbeat.
Then his voice shifted once again and his tone became much more serious. “I don’t know. It’s like a sign of respect. This entire year has been hell on me. I don’t like the fact that I get disrespected so often by my executive board. I can’t be mad at them, so I have to put on this face like it’s okay while they just go on disrespecting me.”
“Uh, I don’t know if it’s really disrespect so much as stupidity and laziness,” I said, thinking back to the Depression Center and the piece on accepting the shit we can’t change. “People say the most fucked-up things to me all the time, and I’m learning that it’s just ignorance. I’d love to tell people to back the fuck off and check their assumptions about me, but all that’ll do is make them think I’m crazier than I am.”
“Like that sorority bitch at the community college,” he said, and I shrugged.
“She actually had reason to question my sanity.” I chuckled. “But in the long run, she’s not worth my time.”
“Yeah, and from the pic you showed me in church, looks like someone put her in check.”
I grimaced. “Yeah, I dunno. I haven’t thought about her.”
“I get where you’re coming from, Branson, but you can’t let people disrespect you.”
“She’s stupid. If her opinion actually mattered to me, then yeah, it probably would’ve bothered me more, but she’s no one to me.” It was always weird whenever I heard this inner truth come out of me that I didn’t even realize was there. But it was true. That girl meant nothing to me. It seemed to bother my brother more than it bothered me.
“Whatever, bro. It’s your life.”
“Harsh,” I said, which was only met by silence.
When he finally did speak again, he wrapped back to a neutral topic. “So yeah, working two menial jobs and then interning for free, I’m fucked when my AC bill is an extra sixty bucks.”
I nodded. “Understood. I’m just not sure now’s the time to ask Mom, you know?”
“Listen, I’ve got to go.”
I knew my brother as well as I knew myself. His quick exit was a less-than-subtle fuck you. Whatever. I knew everything would be back to normal by tomorrow.
22
David and Me
I never understood the crowd mentality. I’d seen it at school, concerts, and hell, even the grocery store on Black Friday. Everyone huddled outside waiting for the doors to open, and as soon as they did, instead of separating from the group, everyone followed the pack into the same section until it filled up. Only then did they realize they had to find their own path. What I didn’t get were the dumbass blank expressions on the followers’ faces when section A in the stadium was filled, which of course left B through Z available, but don’t tell the sheep that. They’d rather bleat and wander aimlessly, waiting for a new herd to follow.
It was social proof that at the core, people weren’t born leaders but born followers. Instead of finding their own way, tapping into their own resources, they simply fell in line with the crowd.
I’d never been a follower. I wasn’t saying I was a leader, but I did pave my own way.
So it was really fucked up when I fell in line behind the herd of students and sat beside them in the center section of the auditorium versus my normal seat away from everyone.
It pissed me off because today I had a choice. That hadn’t always been the case. From my earliest recollections, I’d always been singled out, whether it was from my dad when he got angry or my mom’s reliance upon me to be her emotional support. I’d never been just a part of anything before.
If it were still the caveman days, my exclusion from the fold would’ve meant death. And in some ways, my role in the family did just that. I was singled out for not being more of what they needed.
I’d never forget the summer before college. I worked at the golf course where my old man was head of the pro shop. I missed one day of work, and when he came home yelling, I sensed things wouldn’t go well. When he repeatedly tapped his finger into my sternum, calling me a bitch and a pussy, I did the one thing that was unforgivable: I cried.
The pressure of his finger increased until I felt my chest collapse. When it hurt to breathe and I couldn’t catch my breath, he stopped. Later that night, his girlfriend took me to urgent care. After the X-rays, they asked me how I’d fractured my sternum. For a second, I thought about telling the truth, but I knew better. My survival was dependent on maintaining the lie. Besides, telling the truth would isolate me further in the family. And especially from my father, who’d deny that he had anything to do with it anyway. In my father’s world, his reality was all that mattered.
Four years later, my dissention from my family was complete and 100 percent self-imposed. Why wait until they cut me out of their lives?
“Fuck that.”
Agreed.
I took control of my life and stopped hoping for that someday when my family would see me as something other than my siblings’ keeper.
It helped that David and I created our own pack. Of course, my twin brother didn’t know about David. I knew he’d never judge me, but like Trevor, he’d want David gone. And he’d be more than happy to tell me that David wasn’t real. He’d throw around buzzwords like “command hallucination,” “psychotic episode,” or maybe go as far as “psychotic break.” The people those terms impacted were the caregivers. When a command hallucination took charge, a caregiver’s life disappeared. I couldn’t really blame them. Who wanted to have their life upended?
But on the flipside—and let’s be honest, no one ever considered the flipside—the people in my life didn’t understand what it was like with David. If they did, they’d know that all it boiled down to was jealousy. No one liked Trevor because of the time and attention his presence took away from my greedy little family. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t like Trevor, but I was never jealous of him. David and Trevor may not have been real people, but it begged the question…
“What is real?”
Exactly.
Was it following everyone else in the guise of social harmony? I lived the first twenty years of my life keeping the peace and copying the behavior of others to fit in. It got me nowhere. I remained the outsider. There are no shortcuts to acceptance—you’re either in or out. Whether you were “in” or “out” may have been some cute little catchphrase on those reality TV shows, but when it was your own life, it wasn’t so cute to be the one on the outside always looking in.
So there I was, forced to assimilate in order to do what I had to do. Even though there was an empty seat on either side of me in the clas
sroom, I felt boxed in. A dude with more arm hair than Sasquatch was on one side of me, and a girl who smelled as strong and fruity as one of the bath stores I hurried past in the mall so I wouldn’t suffocate from the stench was on the other side. I sat amongst the crowd in the lecture hall with students beside me, behind me, and in front of me. I practically felt their breath on my cheeks and neck.
“Fucking people.”
Agreed.
“Mr. Kovak.” The professor gave a nod toward my new placement in class.
I gave the customary nod in return. Just another sheep in the fold. Bleat, bleat, bleat.
“Would you care to share your takeaway from the chapter that was assigned?”
“Fuck that.”
I sat where I did to fit in, not stand out. “Nah, I’m good.”
The dude next to me laughed, and the girl who bathed in perfume muttered, “I don’t think it was a request,” under her breath.
I rolled my eyes and waited. If the professor wanted me to give the highlights of the chapter, then they should tell me, not ask. Ask any college senior if they wanted to share anything and the likely answer would be an emphatic no. No, I didn’t want to share my thoughts on any chapter. No, I didn’t want to be in the class. And hell no to the feigned look of concern on the professor’s face.
“No. No. No.”
Exactly my thought.
My ass was in the room. That was enough.
“Would anyone like to share the highlights of the chapter before we begin today’s TED Talk?”
Thankfully no one, not even the do-gooders in the very front row, volunteered to bore us with a recap.
“Perhaps you’ll have comments after the TED talk.” The professor moved toward the computer and began pressing buttons. Two screens slowly descended from the ceiling.
