by Maria Boyd
So is that it, are all of you pretty rich-boy faggots?
I could see Mark’s broad shoulders shaking with rage and the amount of control he was using so as he didn’t reach over and push the guy’s tiny brain out of his ugly head.
No, that would be me you’re talking about. And I don’t want scum like you insulting me in my own house.
The bloke looked a little disconcerted for about three seconds. You could see that Mark did not fit the image he had in his head of a typical poofter. The boys were moving forward; the room was filled with testosterone-charged aggression.
Then the other losers started to fly as many names as they could through the doorway.
You filthy freak!
You arse-licking pedophile!
Pretty-boy faggot, bringing dirt into our area …
I don’t know whether it was because I felt I had to prove something to Mark, whether I didn’t want to be accused of being a poofter, or whether I just wanted the ignorant wanker to shut his mouth, but I pushed past Mark and swung hard into the bloke’s gut. He stumbled but regrouped and came back swinging. I knew I was in it bad but I didn’t care. I felt removed from all of it, focused and controlled, fueled by anger. Behind me I could hear the sound of fists meeting flesh.
It didn’t stop until two cars pulled up. The big guy who had the mouth yelled at his mates to bolt, but it was too late. The cops had already made their way onto the front yard, followed by what looked like the majority of the street all dressed in their pajamas, some looking scared, others looking really pissed off.
I looked around for Elizabeth and found her standing next to the other car that had pulled up. The one with Mark’s parents in it. It turned out she had to ring the school ’cause she didn’t know the address. They were all talking to one of the cops, who was writing down what they were saying. They were keen to take us all to the station, but Mark’s parents did some serious talking. Mark’s dad looked totally wound up and from what I could see he wasn’t going to let these cops take his son anywhere. I could hear his raised voice saying stuff like thugs, lawsuits, illegal entry, harassment and vilification. So the iceman could lose it when he wanted to. Now I could see where Mark got it from.
Eventually we moved into the lounge room. It took about an hour to give our statements. We looked like we’d all had the hardest game of rugby in our lives. One of the Melbourne guys was going to have a black eye, and I reckoned, considering I could only see out of one of mine, so was I.
Mum wasn’t going to be happy. It was then I figured she’d be really worried. I asked if I could use the phone. Walking out to the kitchen I found Elizabeth helping clean up the rest of the party. I hobbled over to her, hoping for just a little bit of sympathy. She looked at me and I could see she was upset. It must have been pretty scary to watch. She went to touch my eye and I flinched.
You bloody hero, she whispered as she gently put her arms around me.
Aren’t your parents going to freak?
Yeah, I don’t want to think about it. Mrs. Newman’s already rung. Dad will be here in a minute. I heard her ring your mum too.
At least I didn’t have to face that.
I was having a great night up until you and Mark had to come over all macho.
I looked at her out of my good eye. That’s a bit strong, isn’t it?
I don’t understand why you didn’t just shut the door in their faces.
I could tell she was serious and I half knew it wasn’t only the fighting she was worried about, but I was too tired, too sore to go into it. It was at that point when her dad and my mum arrived. I figured it was best I kept right away from Mr. Zefferelli. I didn’t want to risk another black eye. I limped over to Mum, worried that she was going to start on the same theme as Elizabeth.
Hello, darling.
Well, at least that was a good start. Better response than anticipated.
Come on, let’s get you home and we’ll talk tomorrow.
She ushered me into the car and made sure that everyone else was all right and had a lift home. Chris, who was driving, was going to take three of the boys. We picked up another two. Just before I left, Mark came over to me.
Thanks, mate.
For what? I think I came off worse than anyone.
You know what I mean.
No big deal.
See you Monday, I said as I shook his hand.
Seat belts, boys, Mum chorused, and there was something wonderfully familiar about the instruction, the tone and the resulting groans.
The phone call
It was 3:00 p.m. on Sunday and I was sitting at my desk trying to get my head around the fact that I had to get the English assignment in to Andrews tomorrow. The fallout from Mark’s party had taken up most of the morning. Mum had the obligatory violence leads to worse trouble talk. But this time it was edged with a touch, just a touch, of I’m pleased that you felt you could stand up for Mark and challenge the other boys.
Yeah, right. As if any of those brainless losers were going to listen to reason.
It was 3:02 p.m. and there was still nothing happening on the assignment front. At 3:04 Elizabeth rang. I knew there was something majorly wrong as soon as I heard her voice. I couldn’t cope with any more drama so I carried on as if everything was normal.
I was going to ring you, but Mum’s been doing the whole parent thing all day. She’s been really cool about it, though. Heaps better than I thought. I mean, she was upset and gave me the usual fists don’t prove anything talk. But it’s not as if I’m grounded or anything. So all in all I reckon it’s turned out all right.
Silence.
I was getting a little freaked out. Normally it was me who didn’t know what to say. I tried again.
Don’t you think?
Silence.
Elizabeth?
I heard something very faint coming from her end.
Elizabeth, don’t cry—
She cut me off before I had a chance to get going on the sensitive and aware routine.
I’m not crying, you idiot … I’m furious! I haven’t said anything because if I told you what I really thought of you, you wouldn’t speak to me again for the rest of my life. You’ve wrecked everything!
What the hell was she going on about?
What do you mean, I wrecked everything?
A really big sigh came rolling down the telephone line straight into my ear.
Will, you knew my parents were strict, I told you enough times, but you still had to go off and prove yourself in front of the boys. And now they won’t let me see you at all. They think you’re a nice boy, but Dad reckons he can’t trust me to go out with someone who’s going to get involved in fights all the time.
Say what?
Now hang on a minute, that’s so not fair! Did you tell them that I was stepping up for a mate? And that I wasn’t one of the losers who turned up on the doorstep looking for a bit of biffo, calling one of our friends, your mum’s precious Mark, a faggot?
I was getting charged up by now.
Did you tell them that, Elizabeth?
Of course I told them. Do you think that I don’t want to see you? But come on, Will, you’ve got to admit part of the reason why you got into the fight was because you felt like you had to prove something.
What did Dad say about strong, opinionated girls?
It had only been forty-eight hours and we were already having our first fight.
Look, that doesn’t matter now. What are we going to do about Mum and Dad?
Well, I don’t know, Elizabeth, but it sounds like you pretty much agree with your parents, so maybe we had better do what they say and not see one another.
Silence. Yeah, let her know she needed to apologize.
Fine.
What? She wasn’t meant to say that. Her voice met my anger and raised it by a hundred.
Fine, Will. That’s fine by me. Nice to see you can be so mature about it. I was going to suggest that you come over and talk to them about it. But
obviously you’ve got far more important things to do, like hang out with your mates. So I’ll leave you to it then.
Great, that would be great.
Another Fine and the phone exploded in my ear.
What was that all about? One minute we were talking normally and the next we’d broken up. So now I was left with a black eye, no girlfriend and a stupid assignment to write in six hours.
Welcome back, Will. Welcome back.
That bloody assignment!
It was now 3:17 p.m. and in the space of thirteen minutes I had managed to destroy all the things that had been good in my life. OK, so maybe I was exaggerating, but this was no time for restraint. I tried to imagine Andrews’s face when I explained how my life had fallen apart in one phone call and that was why I couldn’t complete the assignment I’d had roughly six weeks to do. But I knew the heartless bastard wouldn’t have a bar of it. In fact he’d love it. It was exactly the ammunition he was waiting for, so I’d just have to put up with the black eye and wrecked love life ’cause I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.
I stared at the computer screen. I typed in STEREOTYPES and spent half an hour changing the font and size. It was killing me.
I tried to go back over it step by step. I remembered Andrews going on about how I had to use the musical as a text. What the hell was that about? How could the musical be a bloody text? The guy was obviously having a laugh.
I played about ten games of solitaire in disgust and arrived back at the same blank screen. OK, so stereotypes in the musical … But the people in the musical were people, not bloody stereotypes.
I guess I could talk about the geeks. Fair enough, in the beginning I might have written them off as stereotypes, but when I got to know them they became individual kids. They were still a bit geeky, but when you got down to it they were only kids who happened to like playing their instrument and staying indoors more than team sports.
Then there was Zach, who didn’t give a rat’s whether he was a walking stereotype or not. And then when you got to know him he became a kid who understood stuff because he was smart and he’d had someone in his life walk out on him and he’d spent the last few years trying to understand that. So he kind of understood other people’s stuff as well. He was different, but there was no way he was a stereotype. He was too bloody unique to be a stereotype.
Then there was Mark, who looked like the walking stereotype of the footy player but was gay, and smart. Chris was a mixture of types—the all-around nice guy, responsible jock who reckoned he’d never make it with the girls, but that’s not all he was. Elizabeth was the same, I suppose. Miss I Will Succeed and Miss I’ve Got It All Together, but she had paranoid stress-heads for parents who wouldn’t let her have a boyfriend unless he was a bloody saint.
Come to think of it, if you pulled apart anyone you knew, they could never be just a type because if you bothered to get beyond the bullshit you’d get to see them as individuals. It was as simple as that.
And me? Well, I was the walking stereotype in comparison to all those other people. But I don’t reckon I knew it. I was walking around trying to be exactly what everyone expects an adolescent male to be.
I worked hard at being the guy who was always in trouble with the school but still kept his head above water. The kid who was well known for not doing outstandingly at school but who could pull it out when it counted. The kid who was popular with the popular crowd but still accepted by all. And you know, it was all crap.
I started to get some of my ideas down on the screen. It still didn’t make total sense, but I think I was starting to get it. And even if I wasn’t, Andrews was getting it anyway.
It was 9:35 p.m. My eyes were aching and my head hurt. But I went and got another glass of OJ and settled in for what was going to be a long night.
Special delivery
I walked in the school gates and patted my mate the statue on the head. It had been 1:04 a.m. when I’d shut down the computer and printed out the assignment. I was tired and sore but I was bloody happy to be rid of it. I walked over to the senior quad feeling that things were finally settling down. The boys had moved from handball to playing touch footy with one of those little balls. It was a fairly disjointed game, though, because they’d stop whenever Danielli came out of his office.
I copped it as soon as they saw me.
Willo, mate. That’s one to be proud of!
Jock was reaching his grubby mitts out toward my eye.
Does it hurt?
I pushed him and his hands away.
Back off, Jock, go put your fingers in your own eye.
Then Tim started. So how’s Elizabeth? She’s hot, man!
There was no way they were going to hear that sad story.
Yeah, she’s great.
I just had to figure out a way of letting her know I still thought that.
Jock was looking at me really strangely. I looked at him as if to say What? and then it finally came to me. He wanted me to ask him about the girls.
So how about you, Jock? Any luck?
Funny you should ask, Willo, but there was a certain chorus girl who caught my eye. Mark said he’d get her number for me.
That’s great, Jock. I turned to scan the quad. So have you seen Mark?
Nah, I don’t think he’s in yet.
I knew St. Andrew’s well enough to know that things could get a bit messy for Mark, especially if the tuckshop boys started again. And not just that, what happened on Saturday night would be around the school by morning admin. But I reckoned he’d handle it. We’d handle it. Even Tim and Jock. I had to remember to ask Mark to invite me when he let them in on the fact that he was dead serious when he told the thugs that he was indeed a poofter.
Andrews’s assignment was weighing as heavy as twenty bricks in my bag. The boys reminded me we didn’t have English until tomorrow but I didn’t care. Andrews had gone on and on about Monday and I was going to make a special delivery just so I could see his face. I went and knocked on the staff room door and asked for him.
Andrews came to the door carrying his trademark mug of coffee.
Nice eye.
I nodded. I wondered if the news had made it to the staff room.
I heard there was some trouble. Did things turn out OK?
And they reckon us kids are bad for gossip.
Yeah, sir, I think so. I haven’t seen Mark yet, but yeah.
I didn’t want to go on about it. After all, it was really Mark’s business and he knew Andrews well enough to tell him himself if he wanted to.
I reached into my bag.
Sir, I wanted to give you this.
I handed him the assignment. I wish I could have taken a picture of his face, he was so shocked.
But, Will, we don’t have English today.
I know that now, sir. But did you know that, sir?
Whatever it takes, Will. Whatever it takes. We called a truce, remember?
Yeah, I remembered, but would he? I thought for a moment about telling him that I could see now how me, the musical and the special assignment were all part of his tough-love policy, but I wanted to suss out how that truce went first.
The best I could do was nod in acknowledgment.
I’ll see you in English, sir.
And I walked away feeling that for the first time in ages I’d nailed him.
Something else
I came home that afternoon and for the first time in two months had nothing to do or nothing I should be doing but didn’t want to do. It should have felt great but it didn’t. I still felt like there was something I had to do. Something big.
I was so wound up I even went out and worked in the veggie patch voluntarily. As I pulled up all the crap that had grown since Mum had her last clean-out, I started to think about Elizabeth. I had to sort things out with her. I knew she was too special to lose, I just wasn’t sure how to go about it. Sure, every time I thought of her father’s handshake after the musical I broke into a cold sweat, but co
nsidering I could still barely see out of my left eye, I’d had worse.
As I picked some produce for the latest Patricia Armstrong extravaganza, I surveyed the veggie patch and for a couple of minutes I stopped stressing. It looked good. It was Mum’s and my first combined project and to tell you the truth I was proud of it. I was proud of me and Mum and it. And I know Dad would have been too.
I came in to find Mum setting the table for dinner like we used to. Since the success of the Middle Eastern feast she’d fallen back into it. I washed the veggies and looked around for something else to do. There wasn’t anything, so I started a lap of the house trying to figure the best strategy to use with the Zefferellis. After twenty laps Mum freaked. She told me to either sit down and watch telly or go and walk around my own room and stop annoying her until dinner was ready.
I stopped lapping the house and started lapping the lounge room. As I lapped, the phone beamed out like a two-dollar shop’s bad flashing neon sign. The phone was the answer. The only thing for it was to ring the Zefferellis and leave a message. But I knew it couldn’t be on Elizabeth’s phone because the parents had to hear it. It had to be on the landline.
I made eight attempts and hung up each time. Finally on the ninth try I did it. I sounded like a complete loser, but I carried on about how I was really sorry about the other night and that it was an exceptional case and how I didn’t go around bashing everyone I met. Well, something like that anyway. I’d tackle Elizabeth tomorrow. She’d have to rate the fact that I left myself right open with the landline message, wouldn’t she?
Mum called me to have dinner. I put the posh serviette on my lap before Mum had a go at me and knew I’d played the Elizabeth and parents thing just right. But I still felt wound up. I figured food might fix it and dug into the veggie-patch feast. I looked across the table and watched Mum as she lit the candles.
We spent dinner talking about Andrews, the assignment, the veggie patch and stuff. I asked if she’d mind if I invited Zach over for dinner and she suggested I ask both the Cohens. I nearly choked on the mixed lettuce salad.
