“That’s right, Lembeck,” I said, moving closer to where he and Curtis were standing. “I’m talking to you.” And then I added, “Now.”
I reached out my hand expecting him to fork over the clip. I could almost hear him thinking, Who does she think she is? When nothing happened, I realized that he was in shock. He never would have predicted that I had it in me to do such a thing. Then the right side of his face resumed its usual sneer, and he looked at me out of one narrowed eye.
“Really? And what if I don’t feel like giving it up?”
“No problem. I just report it stolen and give the police a couple of names.”
There was a moment when everything just hung in the air between us. I thought Travis might haul off and hit me in the head. Curtis kept looking back and forth from Travis to me, from me to Travis. This was making me very nervous, because I knew that Travis was going to have to do something in order to prove to Curtis that he was still the alpha idiot.
“Tell you what,” Travis finally said. “How ’bout I give you the clip and then you get to be the one who’s dead meat. How’s that?”
“Whatever.”
I was suddenly a cartoon superhero with cartoon superhero powers. I felt that I was able to see through the cloth of Travis’s down parka and into his sorry little pocket—some stray lint, a few bits of loose tobacco, coins, an old butterscotch-flavored LifeSaver, and a pack of matches were all nestled up against Leonard’s money clip. I just knew it was there and I wanted it.
I had no way of making Travis give it to me. Not really. Leonard’s sob story about how his mother had given him this useless thing would never sway the likes of Travis and Curtis. I just kept thinking, What next? What next? And then a new thought occurred to me. What if I had miscalculated my move, what if I was in the middle of leaping a tall building in not quite a single bound, what if I didn’t know what I was doing? I wasn’t sure if it was the fright, but my legs began to wobble beneath me, and my shoes felt like they were shrinking as I stood there for what seemed like forever.
“So, you queer, too?” Travis asked me.
“Excuse me?” I heard him all right, but I needed some time to think about how to answer.
“You heard him,” Curtis piped in. “Wants to know if you’re a lesbo.”
And then Curtis let out a squeal of girlish laughter that shook his middle and forced tears to his piggy eyes.
That’s when I made my move. I’m not even sure how it happened; I was just there, attached to Travis’s mouth. Leonard gasped with surprise, or maybe it was horror. Curtis lost control of his shopping bag, and it landed with a clank on the pavement. He had stopped laughing and just stood there watching me kiss his friend. Travis went rigid for a minute and tried to pull away from me. But his mouth had developed a mind of its own, and I could feel him kissing me back. His tongue, small and darty and fully alive to the possibilities, was busy leading him forward, into the future and closer to me. He tasted like an aluminum measuring cup or those old canteens from our camping days with my dad. I also caught a whiff of tobacco that clung to his hair and skin, and the smell of him, a surprising mix of chocolate milk and hard candy.
“Whoa,” I heard Curtis mutter in the background.
When I stepped back, Travis looked like a totally different person to me. All his usual hard edges had been smoothed. He seemed like someone I might want to talk to once in a while, someone who could take a joke. I wondered whether I looked different to him, too. It was probably just a lot of hormones getting released into my bloodstream, causing me to see things in a whole new light.
The honk of my mother’s car horn broke the spell.
“Come on, let’s get out of here,” I said, grabbing Leonard and pulling him along toward the car.
“But—”
I was not about to let him finish his sentence.
“Just get in.”
I took the front seat. Leonard climbed into the back.
“Who are those two boys?” my mother asked as she checked out her hair in the rearview mirror.
I rolled the leftover taste of Travis around in my mouth, savoring my success.
“That’s her new boyfriend,” Leonard chimed in from the backseat. “That one. The one on the left.”
“Shut up, you. He is so not my boyfriend. And you of all people should know it.”
“I hope not,” Mom said as the car pulled away from the curb. “Neither of them look much like boyfriend material to me.”
I sat there in the front seat of Mom’s car, fingering Leonard’s stupid money clip inside my coat pocket and feeling that little lift that comes when I’ve scored. As someone who has had some experience in the world of shoplifting, I’ve learned that the release of endorphins is definitely one reason to take the risk and pocket merchandise. I mean, for people like me, it’s rarely a matter of actually needing the stuff. It’s the high I’m after, the lift.
When I was good and ready, I reached over into the backseat and presented Leonard with my balled-up fist. Then slowly, really slowly, I opened my fingers one by one until the money clip was visible in the sweaty center of my palm.
“Here,” I said.
Leonard’s mouth literally dropped open.
“But how…”
Even after he had grabbed hold of the clip and then sat there staring at it, I could feel the ghost of the thing still in my hand. When I looked, there was a deep impression in the middle of my lifeline.
Leonard looked at me as if I were the Blue Fairy in the Pinocchio story, the one who had the power to turn him into a real boy. There were actual tears in his eyes, and he mouthed the words “thank you.”
Jeez, I thought, I’ll never get rid of him now.
And that’s when I burst out crying.
Don’t ask me why. Maybe the wiring of my deep inner emotional life had gotten crossed and I had lost the ability to tell the difference between happiness and sadness. Maybe crying was just a new form of laughing, and vice versa.
When we got home, I marched Leonard out behind the house, sat him down on the trash bin, and told him the story of Winona Ryder. Because I had once been a huge Winona Ryder fan, even going so far as writing letters to her and sending them to her talent agency, I knew her E! True Hollywood Story by heart and had no difficulty working it into our conversation. Even though she had already had a whole career by the time I was old enough to appreciate her and had gone into semiretirement when I was about ten, she still held some kind of fascination for me. Her story was enough to inspire anybody.
“Winona was, like, eight or nine years old and living in Petaluma with her family. She was a total tomboy, and the first week at her new school, these kids attacked her, called her a wuss and worse. Then, for good measure, they gave her a beating. And you know why?”
Leonard was engrossed in the story; he stared at me and didn’t seem to realize that the question was, in fact, directed at him. So I repeated it.
“Do you know why they beat her up?”
“Um … I dunno. Because her last name used to be Horowitz?”
Frankly, I was surprised as hell that Leonard knew this. But that was not the reason she got beat up.
“No,” I told him. “The reason they beat her up was because they thought she was a sissy boy.”
Leonard blinked at me as though he were determined to send me an encoded message by opening and closing his eyelids. I didn’t know the code, however, so it had no effect on me.
“Thank you for getting my money clip back,” he said.
I felt that it was important to tell him the rest of the story; he needed to know that following the beating-up incident Winona’s parents took her out of school, gave her home study, and enrolled her in the prestigious American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, where she was later discovered and given a screen test for the role of Jon Voight’s daughter in Desert Bloom. And even though she didn’t get the part, it did lead to her being cast as a poetry-loving teen in Lucas (a movie I’ve seen
seven times).
But telling Leonard this was obviously a big mistake, because he smiled too brightly and said, “Wait. Are you saying I should take acting classes?”
“No,” I said, because in fact I was not saying that and he was totally missing the point. “I’m saying that you can’t go around looking like a big sissy or you’ll get the shit beat out of you just like Winona did.”
“But it turned out okay for Winona Ryder, didn’t it?”
“Look,” I said to him, lowering my voice and trying a different tack, “I don’t care one way or the other if you’re gay or if you’re not gay. I’m just saying do you have to be so obvious about it all the time?”
“Obvious? How do you mean?”
“The shoes? The beret? The pants? I mean, just for starters.”
“But I like the way they look. They make me feel good.”
“Good?” I asked. “How can they make you feel good? You look ridiculous and everybody’s laughing at you.”
He glanced down at himself—his pants, his shoes, and the parts of himself that he could see. Maybe he was trying to get an idea of how he looked from someone else’s point of view. He shook his head.
“I’m just being myself. I mean, obviously.”
That was pretty much the end of our discussion. I left him sitting there and went inside the house to do something that at the time I considered important but now can’t even remember. About an hour later, when Mom called up the stairs to tell us it was snowing, I looked out my bedroom window to see for myself. That’s when I noticed Leonard; he was still sitting there on the trash bin, leaning back, dangling his stupid platform sneakers and singing like a girl in a high soprano voice.
“Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes,
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes,
Silver-white winters that melt into springs—
These are a few of my favorite things.”
I couldn’t believe my eyes—or my ears. And I remember thinking, If he doesn’t understand that being himself in the world is a complete and total liability, then he deserves whatever comes down the pike to bite him on the ass. The kid’s an idiot. Obviously.
five
MY BEST FRIEND, Electra Wheeler, had her hands around Leonard’s throat and she was pressing her two big thumbs into the hollow areas on either side of his Adam’s apple. His wind was cut off, which would explain why his face had gone bright red, his lips were turning blue, and his eyes were bugging out of his skull. He was gagging.
“Careful you don’t kill him,” I warned from my place on the sideline.
My job was to stand next to Electra and hold her dreads behind her neck. We didn’t want them to swing down in Leonard’s face and distract her from the business at hand. I refused to be the one who actually did the choking. I couldn’t trust myself to not go too far and accidentally murder Leonard.
Ever since school started, he had been making my life a living nightmare. Everyone knew Leonard was my cousin by marriage, and as a result random schoolmates were always approaching me to ask me what was up with him. As if I could explain. By spring break, Leonard had become famous because of the way he dressed, because of the way he walked, because of the way he talked, and because he sang show tunes in the school corridors. He just couldn’t see how far outside the bounds of normal behavior he had strayed, and so he kept acting more and more outrageous. His name had even appeared in The Trident, our school newspaper, when the senior class jokingly nominated him for queen of the Christmas Cotillion. Everyone on the committee was hoping that he would accept the nomination, go on to be crowned, and make history at Neptune High. For weeks, the talk in the cafeteria was all about what Leonard might wear to the cotillion. Leonard, in his usual style, pretended that it wasn’t happening. Christmas came and went, and just when I thought the whole thing had blown over, rumors started to circulate that Leonard’s name was being put forward as a possibility for queen of the prom. When he was confronted with the news, he said he had other, more important things on his mind.
The choking game was Leonard’s idea. He wanted to give it a try after he’d heard about it from several girls in his class who had recently gotten very good at it and had lived to tell the tale. I was against it from the start. But then Leonard offered Electra and me actual money to do the honors, and how could we refuse? Forty dollars could buy us each a movie with all the extras, like a combo popcorn, Twizzlers, and maybe even an order of nachos. We decided that there was no harm in providing Leonard with his idea of a good time.
Electra could have been beading a necklace or hemming a skirt; she was that into it. Her brows were furrowed, her eyes neatly focused, her mouth shut tight, her lips sucked into her mouth. Her cocoa-colored skin was flush with excitement, and I could see a natural blush blooming on both cheeks.
Some people think that black people don’t blush, but that’s because they probably never knew a black person or maybe they never really looked at one closely enough. If they had, they would have discovered that African Americans not only blush, but they also can get sunburned pretty badly, too.
Mom liked to embarrass me by telling a story about the first time I saw an actual black person. It was years ago, before Neptune got all mixed up racially, and folks hadn’t yet moved beyond the bounds of what was considered their area and into what was known as our area. There were still little enclaves of Asian families or Hispanics or whites or blacks, each of them separated by the invisible barriers that were only understood by each respective group. This is ours; that is theirs. People pretty much stuck to their own areas for reasons that made sense only to themselves. The weird part is, the areas weren’t that big; they could extend for maybe a half a block on one side of the street, and once you crossed over to the other side you could be in a whole other area, populated by a different race of human. But it wasn’t as though people were being forced to live within their assigned areas; people just naturally stuck to their own.
Then in the mid-nineties it all just broke down and everyone started moving all over the place. Money became the primary factor in determining where a person chose to live. If you had the bucks to buy a big house, no sweat, you could move in and no one was going to give you a hard time or even raise an eyebrow—at least to your face. After a while, we even started to consider Neptune a progressive town because we had all these ethnic groups living smashed up against one another and pretty much everyone got along. We even forgot the fact that only ten years earlier everything had been completely different. My mother often told the story about me, not with the intention of embarrassing me but rather to make the point that the situation in Neptune had changed for the better.
As the story goes, I was about three or four years old and playing with my dolls on our front steps. A black man came walking down our street. I don’t remember this, but Mom says I started yelling to her, telling her to come quick, because there was a chocolate man in front of our house. She said I was frantic with excitement.
When I first told this story to Electra, she and I were sitting on her canopied bed in her bedroom, confessing the secrets of our youth to each other. It was my turn, and I figured if I told her the chocolate man story myself instead of her hearing it later on from my mother, I might not come off seeming like a pint-size racist. As I set the scene for Electra, I was careful to include all sorts of caveats, like “What did I know? I was only three or four years old,” and “Hey, I’d never seen a black person up close and personal; what could you expect?” She listened to the whole story and then stared at me for an eternity. I thought she was going to hit me, but then, finally and very unexpectedly, she burst out laughing and fell back onto her bed. The idea that she herself could be chocolate seemed to delight her to no end. When she had pulled herself together, she held out her forearm and said, “Lick it, bitch.” We howled and then fell back onto her bed together. After that, whenever anyone showed any kind of racial prejudice or disrespect toward her and I happened to be aroun
d, she would hold out her arm to the offending party and say, “Lick it, bitch.” Eventually, all she had to do was hold out her arm and we would both understand and laugh.
“Ohmygod, ohmygod,” said Leonard, trying to catch his breath and looking all excited, like he had just seen Jesus. “That was … ohmygod, that was … wow. I’m like … wait … Okay, it’s still … no, it’s done. That was fabulous. You guys … you guys should totally try it.”
Electra and I looked at each other and began to laugh out loud. We didn’t need to have the oxygen cut off from our brains and then restored in a sudden rush just so we could have a good time. We went in more for watching movies or doing our nails.
“Right. Like I would ever let you put your hands around my throat,” I said to Leonard. “And anyway, you wouldn’t do this if you saw your face. You looked gruesome.”
“Totally,” Electra concurred. “Nobody oughta give themselves over to ugly like that ’less it’s gonna save lives or get you on Oprah.”
Leonard was massaging his neck and examining himself in the mirror, gingerly fingering the bright-red marks that Electra had left around his throat. I wondered whether at home I would get blamed for the telltale bruises and forced to say how it had happened, but then I noticed Leonard putting on his turtleneck and figured that maybe no one would ever find out.
“So when do we get paid?” Electra asked him.
Leonard looked at her and then tilted his head to one side. I knew what was up. He was quietly assessing her look, wondering how he could improve her, make her over, and he was about to offer his services.
“You know, Electra—” he began.
“Forget it,” I told him before he could go any further. “We’re going to the movies. Fork it over.”
“I’ll pay the money. It’s not instead of the money. I’m just offering to … I don’t know … like the dreads. How important are they to you?”
Absolute Brightness Page 5
