A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me

by Jason Schmidt

  “And this is my rat,” Marti said, pointing to a glass cage on a shelf next to the television, “Roosevelt.”

  “Hi, Roosevelt,” I said.

  “We’re going upstairs,” Marti announced.

  “Okay,” Marti’s mom said.

  I followed the girls to a doorway at the other end of the living room, which led to a steep flight of stairs that turned sharply up to an attic room. When I got up there I saw the usual teenager stuff: bookshelves, a small portable stereo, clothes scattered everywhere, and a twin bed next to a filthy bathroom. Then, on the other side of the room, I saw a mattress laid down on the floor with a stack of neatly folded clothes next to it.

  “I’m staying here for a few days,” Alexis said. “Just long enough for things to cool down. I’m having an issue. With my parents.”

  “Sure,” I said, thinking I wished I had a mattress and some extra clothes at Ryan’s house. I still went over there most weekends, and we still did mostly the same stuff we’d always done: sports I didn’t understand the rules for, watching TV, role-playing games, blowing things up, trespassing, and petty larceny. He’d traded his paper route for a job at McDonald’s, so instead of getting up with him and delivering newspapers, I got up with him and walked him to work, then hung around in a nearby park and read until he finished the breakfast shift. I’d been sleeping at his place six or seven nights a month for more than two years, but I still slept on the floor, under my coat, with my backpack as a pillow. Not that Ryan and his mom owed me anything, but boy—I would have loved a mattress.

  “Alex is always having issues with her parents,” Marti volunteered, when I didn’t respond to Alexis’s declaration.

  “Who doesn’t?” I said.

  Marti giggled nervously. Alexis smiled. She seemed to approve.

  Marti mostly left us alone after that, under the pretext of going downstairs to help her mom get dinner ready. Alexis played me Amy Grant songs on Marti’s stereo, and told me how her and Marti’s dads were both Masons, and how Alexis and Marti had both been members of a girls’ auxiliary group called Job’s Daughters.

  “It was fun,” she said. “In a way. We did car washes to raise money and stuff. But everyone was always in everyone else’s business. That was why I kind of had to quit after I got pregnant. After I got rid of it.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I mean, I kind of actually got kicked out. But they would have let me stay if I’d been sorry, so I figure not apologizing was sort of the same thing as quitting.”

  I made a noncommittal noise, and thought about how interesting this day was working out to be. I’d gotten up that morning, gone to school, with no idea that anything out of the ordinary was going to happen. Now here I was, having this conversation, in this place, with this girl. And why was it all happening? What had it taken to launch my life into the Twilight Zone in one afternoon? A little exercise, a replacement for one of my front teeth, and a leather jacket.

  Jesus.

  I realized that the experience I was having right that minute actually explained a lot about why cool, attractive people acted so strange so much of the time. Their lives were always like this, only the girls were prettier, the houses bigger, and the cars nicer. They didn’t even live on the same planet as I did.

  I had no illusions about that point: I did not belong in this place, doing these things, with these people. Brandon might be able to handle social mobility, or evolution, but I was utterly incapable of adapting. It was only a matter of time before I screwed something up, tipped my hand, and got sent back to the Dungeons & Dragons table in the metaphorical cafeteria of life.

  I realized Alexis and I had been staring into each other’s eyes for kind of a while.

  “So,” she said. “Are you going to kiss me or what?”

  We were sitting next to each other at the top of the stairs that led up to Marti’s room. The best model I had for this kind of thing was Princess Leia and Han Solo at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. I did my best.

  “That was pretty good,” she said when I came up for air. “But you should use your tongue. Like this.”

  We kissed again, and her tongue peeked into my mouth. I was surprised by how intimate it was, given how gross the idea sounded. I tried to replicate what she was showing me and she pulled back.

  “Little motions,” she said. “You’re not trying to lick my tonsils off.”

  “Okay,” I said. I did better the next time.

  Marti’s mom must have picked up on what was happening, because Alexis and I only got about fifteen minutes of kissing before Marti came up and said she had to take me home. I made small talk on the way back, but all I could think, over and over again, was that everything was different now. Again. Everything was just going to keep being different—changing—from now on.

  It was a terrifying realization.

  * * *

  Words were abstract to Alexis. The things she said always meant something else. When she asked me questions, she read things into my answers—things I didn’t mean to say, didn’t think I’d even implied. Then she explained to me why I meant the thing she’d heard, instead of what I’d said. I found it discomfiting and avoided the problem by not talking much when we were together. I was honestly surprised when she seemed to find my brooding silences intriguing.

  The second time she came over to my house, she told me she’d run into Lizzie on the stairs and that Lizzie had asked who Alexis was.

  “I said, ‘I’m Jason’s girlfriend!’” Alexis announced proudly.

  “You did?” I asked. It was news to me, but I didn’t see the harm in it. There wasn’t a lot of competition for the position.

  The only real instruction I’d received about how all this worked was from Brandon, who, in the wake of the Sadie thing, had adopted a decidedly mercenary approach to relationships. He’d told me the worst thing I could do in a new relationship was to push too hard. But, so far, that didn’t seem to be a problem with Alexis.

  “I love you,” she said, the next time she came over to my house. I’d cleaned my room so we could make out there, since she was still staying at Marti’s place. We were lying on my bed, fully clothed, making out. I had one hand on her hip. It was as close as I’d been willing to come to trying to feel her up.

  “Uh,” I said. “I love you, too?”

  “Are you a virgin?” she asked.

  I blinked in surprise. “Yes.”

  “Hm,” she said. “We’ll have to work on that.”

  “Okay.”

  “Would you like that?”

  I wasn’t sure what to do with that question.

  “What do you like?” she asked when I didn’t answer. “What are you into?”

  “I just said—I haven’t done anything yet.”

  “Fine, but what do you think about when you jerk off?”

  “I don’t.”

  “You don’t think about anything?” she asked.

  “No. I mean, I don’t—the other thing you said.”

  “You don’t jerk off?” she asked.

  “No.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me.

  “Are you telling me the truth?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Never?”

  “Never,” I said.

  “That’s totally bizarre,” she said.

  She was right, of course. My attitudes about sex were weird. I’d only recently started to appreciate how weird they were, compared to most other people. Kris had been giving me shit about it when she thought I was being prudish. Which was pretty much every time the subject of sex came up in any context.

  “How a kid who grew up around as much balling as you did could be so sex-negative is just beyond me,” she’d say.

  I thought she was probably just trying to convince herself that the human sexuality lesson she and Jimmy had given me when I was four was a good thing, but I didn’t need any convincing on that score. When I thought about it—which I really hated doing—I figur
ed that my attitudes about sex, and about male sexuality specifically, were mostly based on everything I’d seen and heard after watching Kris and Jimmy screw. Because sure, there was all the theory about humping and fucking and all that silly kid stuff we used to talk about when I was little. But in practice, in the real world, most of the stuff I heard about men was unspeakably bad.

  Back in Eugene, Marcy’s boyfriend Kenneth had supposedly molested Marcy’s daughters, Faith and Crystal. Jimmy’s drug buddy had molested Lizzie. Calliope had woken up in the middle of the night and found Will jerking off and crying next to her bed. One of Dad’s teachers had molested him when he was young. I had my own experiences with Principal Adams, ambiguous as they were. Prison, which was a constant backdrop in the mythology of my people, was virtually synonymous with rape. And wherever I went when I was little, there were always the warnings: never get into a car with a strange man; never trust strange men; if a strange man tries to grab you, scream; if a man touches you in your bathing suit area, tell someone. It wasn’t just a lot of talk. It happened to me and Eddie that time by the railroad tracks, when an actual strange man had asked if we wanted to go into the bushes with him and watch him beat off.

  In spite of all this, I had, by some miracle, managed to avoid the trap of believing that I might secretly have one of these monsters lurking inside of me. I never worried about waking up one morning with an uncontrollable desire to use my penis to ruin someone else’s life. But I hated those people—those men. I hated them with an elemental purity. After Principal Adams it was like a constant hum, like the feeling of standing under high-tension electrical wires. It made the hair on my arms stand up. And I’d get a little zap if I thought about touching myself at night. Or looking at dirty pictures. Or looking down a girl’s shirt when she bent forward. Until finally, right around the time when I might have been motivated to try to get past all that negative reinforcement, there was the thing where my dad and Billy and Scotty, and every third guy I saw walking down the street, were all suddenly dying of a horrible wasting illness. That they got from having sex.

  None of it meant that I’d given up on sex. I wanted romance. I wanted to date. It was just that, without knowing what the reward was, I hadn’t had enough motivation to figure any of it out. And, really, I didn’t think I’d need to figure it out on my own. I’d always had some idea that there’d be some natural process of discovery that I’d go through, that I’d meet a girl who was as inexperienced as I was and we’d learn this stuff together. Then I’d work my way up to kissing and copping a feel and heavy petting and so on. But that wasn’t how it was working out.

  With Alexis, sex felt like a cross between an aptitude test and a kids’ game. I was supposed to let down all my defenses and let her touch me—like we were playing doctor or something—except I was being scored the whole time. And it was pretty obvious from Alexis’s attitude that my test results this time around were not going to be in the 99th percentile. I tried to slow things down, but I couldn’t articulate the why of it; I kept stumbling into platitudes about respecting her too much to rush things. The idea that I might want to take things slow for my own reasons was a nonstarter. It was an article of faith for Alexis and everyone else I knew that a healthy teenage boy would crawl a mile on his hands and knees over broken glass for the privilege of sticking his hands down some girl’s pants.

  Brandon’s recent behavior certainly seemed to support that mythology.

  Maybe there really was something wrong with me.

  * * *

  A week or so after we started dating, Alexis moved out of Marti’s house and back in with her parents. She lived in the same part of North Seattle as Marti, but in a much nicer house, with nicer furniture and a nicer yard. She only took me up there a couple of times, usually when nobody else was around.

  She introduced me to her mother once, in passing—literally. We were passing through the living room, on our way to get a textbook from her bedroom, and her mom was in there on the couch. Alexis said, “Mom, this is Jason,” as we were walking by. I wouldn’t have been able to pick her mom out of a lineup afterward. I never met Alexis’s father. She was still mad at her parents. She’d been mad at them for a long time. It took me about a week to get the story out of her.

  “They locked me up,” she said one afternoon in my bedroom.

  “Like, in a hospital?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “I tried to kill myself,” she said.

  “How?” I asked, thinking about my dad, and the scars on his wrist.

  “That time?” she said.

  “There was more than one time?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “That time it was with a bottle of aspirin. The time before that I cut up my stomach with a kitchen knife.”

  “You can’t kill yourself with a bottle of aspirin,” I said.

  Or by cutting up your stomach with a kitchen knife, I thought.

  “Well, sure,” she said. “I know that now. It happened because I ran away. I mostly lived in the University District. In squats, or with friends. I told people my name was Lauren, so it would be harder for the cops to track me down. Eventually they caught me and sent me home. My parents went with me everywhere for a week, to keep me from running away again. So I swallowed a bottle of aspirin to get away from them. Afterward, they said they were taking me to family counseling. We went to this place up north that turned out to be another hospital. But I didn’t know that. We all went in together, and I was in front, and I went through this doorway ahead of them and the door closed behind me. When I turned around and tried to open it, the doorknob just spun.”

  I frowned. I was thinking that someone who did something like that to me would be taking their life in their hands to sleep in the same house I did every night. But then, my dad had done plenty of awful shit to me—including threatening to have me committed—and I had never killed him in his sleep. So maybe it was all relative.

  “I fought the nurses for a while,” she said. “They tied me down. Four-points restraints, they called it. I was like that for days. Eventually I just gave up. They kept me for a few weeks. Counseling. Group sessions.”

  “Why’d they let you out?” I asked.

  “The doctors said I was better. I think really our insurance just ran out.”

  She never asked me anything about my dad or my home life. She never asked me where Dad was all the time or why he never came out of his room when he was home. Never asked me where my mom was. I wondered who she thought she was talking to, what she thought I was thinking while she was telling me these things.

  “Anyway,” she said, “they’re not my real parents.”

  I jolted back into the conversation.

  “What?”

  “I’m adopted,” she said. “You can’t tell?”

  “How would I be able to tell?” I asked.

  “They’re white.”

  “… and you’re not?”

  “I’m one-eighth black,” she said. “That’s why my hair’s so curly.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  It was sort of possible. Her hair was curly. She had blue eyes, but that didn’t mean much. Even at Garfield I knew a few blue-eyed black people. Still, I figured that about half of everything Alexis told me was pure bullshit. I could just never tell which half.

  “How do you know?” I asked. “About being part black?”

  “It’s on my birth certificate,” she said.

  I sighed. That was no help. I decided it didn’t matter. I’d let her have this one.

  63

  Brandon and I spent a lot less time together during junior year. Partly it was just that we were heading in different directions personally. But there was a social component as well. Since his initial foray into womanizing, Brandon had gone through a couple of evolutionary downgrades, each one harder to respect than the last.

  Appearance-wise, he’d stepped up his game considerably. He trimmed his old bowl cut down to a standa
rd side part, which he held in place with enough hair product to achieve what we used to call the wet look. He got rid of his parachute pants in favor of artificially distressed jeans, and he started wearing an old denim jacket of mine, with the sleeves rolled up, over designer T-shirts. He was still kind of chunky and his skin wasn’t great, but he had kind of a nerdy River Phoenix thing going on that seemed to work for him.

  Once his physical transformation was under way, he had apprenticed himself to a guy named Andre, who he’d met through one of his cousins, or who maybe was one of his cousins. Brandon’s extended family relationships didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Andre didn’t go to our school. He wasn’t even a kid—he’d graduated from high school three years earlier, in 1985. He had a day job of some kind and owned a nice car, and he was an unnerving amalgam of hotness: short, spiky black hair, pale skin, thick black eyebrows, dark eyes, and a hawklike nose over a wide, angular mouth and a sharp chin. He was medium height, rail-thin, and ridiculously muscular.

  Andre and Brandon spent a lot of nights cruising the all-ages clubs in South Lake Union and the University District. The summer before our junior year, Brandon told me he’d had sex with thirteen girls in parking lots, alleys, and the bathrooms at Skoochies—arguably the most important downtown hangout for teenagers looking to score since the closing of the Monastery a few years earlier. I never went to either place, but I heard a lot of stories.

  Apart from his formidable skills as a pickup artist, Andre also had a black belt in tae kwon do, which was something Brandon had been interested in since the mugging incident where the kid hit him in the arm with the bottle. They started training together, and Andre introduced Brandon to the Guardian Angels, a local chapter of a New York–based vigilante organization that got its start doing community safety patrols in the New York subways. The Seattle Angels were a mixed bag of prison guards, full-contact martial artists, cop wannabes, and local busybodies who were just looking for some shit to get into. Brandon started going on patrols with them, and pretty soon he’d mastered not only sex but violence as well. And, by extension, fear.