The Invisibles

by Hugh Sheehy

  “No,” he whispers.

  How about now? I write.

  “Not yet.”

  Today Mr. Clayborn lugs in a large cardboard box containing his taxidermic collection of roadkill. Mr. Clayborn, PETA member, boombox-toting founder of Right Now!, faculty advisor to the freshman class president, master of the a.m. glad-handed greeting, how we scorn you. You and your box of preserved armadillo, jackrabbit, chipmunks, guinea fowl, raccoon, and squirrels. Lionel and I are cool as gargoyles as our classmates express chirpy excitement about today’s plan to pass around animal corpses.

  Mr. Clayborn’s nose wrinkles as he breathes through his mouth, out of breath and flushed from the exertion of carrying these dead animals up two flights of stairs, a light fog in his glasses. “I thought you guys might want to get a good look at an armadillo’s feet.”

  Lionel opens a turquoise folder and mutters into it, “I thought you might want to get a good look at my balls.”

  Mr. Clayborn holds up the small, armored, pig-faced animal so that we can see its wicked-looking black claws. “This guy is my favorite. It’s truly a wonder that such a timid beast is endowed with such dangerous natural tools.” It is this verbal excess that pushes Lionel into the airless realm of disbelief. On the desk he tilts our worksheet that features diagrams of the animals in Clayborn’s box. He scribbles neat, elaborate notes in the margins with a number 2 pencil. By the time the armadillo reaches our table we have thoroughly studied, written about, and added genitals to diagrams of the jackrabbit, the squirrels, and the raccoon. All of the lab groups are working at what Mr. Clayborn deems a medium noise level. I am well-informed of what Lionel expects of me, and I wait until a girl in the front asks a complicated question and Clayborn is preoccupied.

  I’m nervous, and Lionel is right there beside me, urging through thin, excited lips, “Do it, Wheeler, do it, get us in trouble. You think you know how much but you never will if you don’t do it.” With a newly sharpened pencil he traces a five-pointed star in the middle of our worksheet until the paper tears. “Come on, come on.”

  As Mr. Clayborn explains a squirrel’s digestive system to a pair of girls up front, I take the shiny armadillo in both hands. It’s light and hollow and football-sized. I pretend to weigh my options, letting Lionel’s words tickle until I can no longer control myself. I twist off its claws quickly and, snickering, hand it to Lionel, who breaks into hard laughter at Mr. Clayborn’s alarmed shout. As the teacher rushes to us, slamming hips against tables, Lionel drives his pencil up into the armadillo as far as it will go. He holds it up by the eraser, offering it like a Popsicle, and Mr. Clayborn swats it out of his hand so that it hits the floor and cracks.

  “Oh my God,” Brooke says as we wait in the long line of cars leaving the parking lot. She quickly smokes, trying to ignore the faces of her old schoolmates as they walk past us to their parked cars. She tells us, “You guys are assholes, in addition to being idiots.”

  Behind the rebukes she is amused, holding back a smile, and I think that perhaps she is baiting Lionel, to get him to joke with her. She’s not used to him being such a grouch. It almost makes me talkative, but I don’t want to get involved in their relationship. Except for the grunt with which he confirmed my story, he has made no sound since getting into the smoke-smelling car. He ignores her and holds his eyes on the blasted sky, and Brooke gives up on him for the moment.

  We wait in full sight of her old friends and the quarterback ex-boyfriend she blames for her predicament. They stand in a stylish group beside the tennis courts, staring as we roll past, and the quarterback ex-boyfriend will not take his eyes off of Brooke holding the steering wheel and staring ahead. He’s hoping she will let him look into her eyes, and then talk to her for just a minute, put his hand near hers, and so on. Brooke is strong under this pressure. She finds me in the rearview and asks about the headlines of the school paper, whether the editors are holding up without her.

  The quarterback ex-boyfriend stops trying to get her attention and fumes at Lionel. Either Lionel doesn’t notice, or he doesn’t care. I worry about all this. This quarterback ex-boyfriend will stare all the way across the cafeteria at the empty table that Lionel and I share at lunch. I am bigger than he is, yet the flawless muscular black boys from the football team follow him like a bodyguard, and like the other white kids in this school I fear these stronger, handsomer black boys. But the quarterback ex-boyfriend’s anger with Lionel is undercut by his ex-boyfriend sadness. I’ve been by his locker, and there are pictures of him with Brooke taped all over the door. At the moment I passed, two of Brooke’s old friends were comforting him as he moped. Lionel says he is a pussy. It is not Brooke’s quarterback ex-boyfriend that has made Lionel sit like a stony god of hatred in the front seat.

  “Lionel, what’s up with you today?” Brooke is cautious with him, asking gently, then respecting his silence as we escape the school grounds and cross the road where the subdivisions end and the farmlands begin on the way to the lakeshore.

  Lionel will not admit that Clayborn caught him tongue-tied in the principal’s office. It’s too embarrassing for him. I don’t like to think about it, but the truth is that Mr. Clayborn turned out to be tougher than we’d expected. He knows what Lionel and I are about, the ideas we have, even the way we view the teachers. Neither of us was prepared for this revelation. We could only dodge his eyes and listen. He sat on the edge of the principal’s desk, as the principal supported him by repeatedly looking at us and then at his wristwatch. He pointed a thick Clayborn finger at each of us, one at a time. “This alternative education you’re investing yourselves in isn’t going to pay off, unless you guys are trying to find out what the floor smells like in Stryker, because that’s where this kind of behavior is going to take you.” He said this to both of us but the conversation was between him and Lionel. And when Lionel opened his mouth, Mr. Clayborn cut him off. “What do you think, that nobody’s done any of this stuff before? You think you’re Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

  “He doesn’t even know what he’s saying,” Lionel tells Brooke and me, as he and I prepare to smoke more crystal-form cocaine and disappoint Brooke, in our spot. “He couldn’t possibly understand the subtlety of our project.” He does not attempt to explain this subtlety. It seems best not to ask him to. We all three sit against the granite hunk because Fritz the German lunatic has moved from his usual place on the dock and relocated directly across the murky water from us, shrunk by a hundred yards’ distance, and though I don’t think he can see that far I’m not very comfortable with the possibility. Even if we did not drink wine and beer and smoke cigarettes and crystal-form cocaine, I don’t believe I would want anyone to see the three of us out here. My friends don’t embarrass me, but I’m not sure we’ll always be friends.

  Lionel produces a spike of fire with his butane lighter and sparks a bowl. He exhales and gives me the pipe, then lays back against the boulder with his arms relaxed at his sides. Like a toy bald person. His chest rises and falls faster, and he grins his cottonmouth grin and tells us, “Yes. Fuck Clayborn. I’ll kick his ass with thoughts.”

  I’m slow to smoke and I hold the pipe to my lips awhile. Brooke has developed a small double chin, which Lionel and I agree is very cute. She hides her pregnant belly under sweatshirts and coats, though Lionel has touched her bare skin and felt the baby kick. He tells me she would let me do this as well, that it’s not a couples thing, but I said no thanks. I’m not interested in touching her, or in babies. She smokes and blows rings, pensive and sad and resigned to look over at us for a reason to smile, and she sees me holding the pipe like I am. She rolls her eyes.

  “You two,” she says, and looks away. It is as if we have once again caused her to catch us wearing her bras on our heads, and it is no longer funny. In a way we have come to enjoy this general feeling. I light up and enjoy what’s left of the day in this season of diminishing afternoons. It’s cold with a gonna-storm dampness, and we are all three in jackets beside the pon
d full of sunken leaves.

  Lionel believes that Brooke is tougher than either of us. He tells me this as we smoke cigarettes under the clean autumn night sky. He is thinking about their future together, which is what he thinks about when Brooke is gone and he is tired of thinking about getting even with Mr. Clayborn.

  Today Brooke went to a sonogram reading with her quarterback ex-boyfriend and all their parents. Strictly political. She disobeys her parents most of the time and does what she wants to but says they deserve to have a daughter once in a while. “So much wiser than us,” says Lionel, a little high from this afternoon. “She’s tough.”

  I’m inclined to agree with him.

  When the school nurse interpreted the blue plus sign on the home test for her, Brooke knew she was as good as expelled. She pulled off her senior class ring and squeezed it in her fist until she felt sweat or blood. That summer she could get an equivalent degree and depart from her academic days in virtual obscurity, without throwing a mortarboard or a party in her parents’ backyard. She wanted none of it, nor did she want the words being said by the young nurse sitting beside her on the tightly made white cot.

  The nurse, a graduate of a women’s college who trusted her youthful sensibilities to overlap with ours, was saying a lot of words, and one especially. Options.

  Brooke pushed the hand from her elbow and walked out of the office. She took the dizzy road to her boyfriend’s chemistry class where, between teacher and chalk equations and twenty-two concentrating adolescents, everyone knew something had gone wrong. A few kids later bragged that they had guessed she was knocked up, but no one claimed to have the intuition to predict her next move. No one would have believed that story, because we all knew that people would meet up years later and still express excitement and surprise over the new confidence that she displayed as she lifted her quarterback boyfriend’s pen hand by the wrist and confiscated his highlighter and then planted her sweaty ring in the center of his palm.

  It was the twin of his, and he had paid for both. To wear them had been his idea, like they were teenagers and tacky and also engaged, and Brooke wanted no more reminders.

  With the ring in his hand her quarterback boyfriend became her ex. People said he was totally still and that he didn’t lift his head until she’d turned away. Now that she’d done what she came to do, Brooke’s strength began to leave her, her shoulders fell, and she rushed toward the classroom door, almost tripped, then disappeared clattering into the hall. The class sat stunned through the long, shrill bell.

  I wonder what she does all day while we sit at school. When I ask Lionel, he tells me, “Stuff that pregnant dropouts do.” It troubles him, too, the mystery of her. Moonlight falls blue on his head as he smokes and thinks of her, off with the strangers she knows.

  I imagine her routine involving a quart of mint chocolate chip ice cream, a television, and all the sadness that a person by herself can work up. Maybe Brooke and my mom watch the same programs while I’m at school all day. Maybe they could get together, get their schedules lined up.

  My mom is called to the school the day that Lionel sets off the explosions in the senior bathroom. This is after the paramedics rush six football players out of the school on gurneys, Brooke’s quarterback ex-boyfriend among them, sitting up in goony anguish over the terrible bleeding burn on his throwing hand.

  I walk into the principal’s office, escorted by two city cops who are good at scowling. There’s my mom, sitting across the desk from the principal and Mr. Clayborn. She has put on jeans and pulled a pink T-shirt over a thermal undershirt, beneath which she wears a bra that reproduces the bulge of breasts. She is wearing the wig of bouncy blonde-brown hair that she hates like a curse put on her alone. By the light glaze on her blue eyes I see that she had not planned to leave the house today. She has a hard time keeping her head still and probably wants to take a nap. When the principal voices concern that she might pass out, she holds up a bony hand and says, “Huh-uh.” She reaches out her shaking hand for me, and I sit facing her so that she can try to pulverize my shoulder with her weak grip.

  “You,” she says, almost as tall as me but oh so brittle. “Did you do this?”

  “No.” I didn’t. It was the first of our experiments for which I was demoted to observer status. Lionel didn’t trust me to handle the potassium hydroxide. He thought I’d bring it into contact with a microscopic piece of water, and so he dried the sinks in the bathroom himself, stuffed the drains with paper towels, and then sprinkled into each a few white crystalline flakes. The potassium hydroxide flakes resembled the crystal-form cocaine that we have smoked in our spot near my house. Lionel dismissed my analogy with a callous bah-and-wave. He peeled off latex gloves and said, “If you want to smoke it, I suggest you wear a gas mask.”

  I had only meant that there was perhaps a noticeable cycle in our experiments. My point was lost, in the gloom of the bathroom, on his single celebration bounce. He led me out into the hall, where we hung out next to a window with the view of the lot of gleaming student cars and waited for lunch to end and the football team to trash the senior bathroom, according to routine. As they roared past us into the brick-walled lavatory, none of them noticed us, except for the quarterback ex-boyfriend, that melancholy ad model whose diminishing power was to make you feel sorry for him. He moped at us, and we stared at him, invincible nobodies. As the daily riot started inside, Lionel and I headed for the doors to the gym hallway, for we were scheduled to be physically educated.

  The first bang sounded just as we reached the end of the lockers. It was as if a big, steel pocket of air had burst, followed by shouts in the bathroom, the sounds of boys directing one another in matters of first aid. We stopped. Someone shouted some nonsense about a gun, and girls began to scream from the bathroom down to our end of the corridor. The second explosion sent us all running out of the school, Lionel and me at the front of a teeming mob of panicked teenagers. He was trying very hard to laugh at what he had done, but like me he grew quiet once we stood behind the fearful, gossiping, overreacting crowd in the parking lot.

  For some time he looked down at his Airwalks, and then, as if something had occurred to him, his face hardened like that of a guy going out to the firing squad. He took his cigarettes from his pocket and lighted one. There was nothing he could do, now that he had done what he had done. Suspicions about his involvement were only as natural to the principal and Mr. Clayborn, the keeper of volatile chemicals, as was their dislike of a kid who shaved his head and wore pictures of zombies on his shirts and who sneered at them with all the calculated ferocity of a fourteen-year-old. Lionel was who he was, and I admired him for it. He sighed and wearily smiled and looked over the crowd and the school like he owned both. He smoked an illicit cigarette on school grounds, knowing he would be lucky to finish it before they marched out to seize him. I looked across the heads of the crowd to the shining school doors, where there appeared, no mistake, Mr. Clayborn, who immediately saw me, the marker of Lionel’s location.

  Clayborn was not graceful in his apprehension of my friend. The cigarette fell to the blacktop and continued to burn, as its owner was dragged off by a nearly violent science teacher into the crowd of impressed students. I was surprised to be left standing alone, but the students were watching Lionel. It was as if I, the biggest freshman in the school, had somehow been overlooked. I went in with the crowd when the fire trucks left and attended what was left of gym class. No one bothered to change for the few minutes left, and we were shooting around in our school clothes when the cops came into the gymnasium and asked Ms. Nagle which kid was me.

  Expecting to be handcuffed for the first time in my life, I tell Mr. Clayborn and the principal that I am not responsible for the chemical mines. They confer, and Mr. Clayborn suggests that I wouldn’t have known about these compounds. “He’s not in the advanced class with Lionel. And I just don’t think Francis would do something like this.”

  To my disbelief and great guilt they believe me. My mom
is willing to let them believe what they want to. She has her own plans for me. The principal sends the policemen away. I am told that as we speak Lionel is waiting to be taken to jail. The principal and Mr. Clayborn are oddly compassionate as they tell me this. They treat me like an old friend, and I squirm in my chair. From these men I expected nothing less than persecution and torture. For some reason they now view me with eager curiosity in their middle-aged faces.

  From his perch on the desk, Mr. Clayborn says, “I know that you went along with him because you didn’t want him to feel alone. I understand. He’s a bright kid, and it must have hurt him to be wrong about a lot of things. Why was he so unhappy? Was it his family?”

  Who can say? A fourteen-year-old boy, no matter how tall and physically mature, cannot. My mom is one person in the room who is aware of this.

  “I’m going to take him home now,” she says. She’s exhausted, and these men are crazy to her. At the door she tells them, “Lionel was his best friend.”

  She’s driven the cruiser and I sit shotgun, trying to see into the backseats of the police cars parked along the curb ahead of us for Lionel’s bald head.