Ready to Fall

by Marcella Pixley

  “Don’t be a stranger,” says the waitress.

  Cage pats his belly and puts his sweater back on. “Couldn’t even if I tried,” he says.

  The waitress picks up the check and walks away.

  We put our jackets on in silence. Cage opens the door for me. It’s snowing and cold outside. We walk back to campus in silence, our hoods and collars flipped up to protect us from the wind. Every once in a while, Cage tries to say something funny, and I know I should respond, because that’s what people do, but the tumor is shouting at me and I’m tired from almost but not quite telling my secret.

  We climb the steps to Trowbridge Hall, which, as always, is filled with the confident voices of people who love the sound of their own words that buzz into the air like insects, filling the space with a deafening cacophony that mocks me as I walk through the halls with my fingers curled around the shard in my pocket, and my lips clamped shut.

  THOMAS A. TROWBRIDGE THE FOURTH

  In the late afternoon, the sun slants through the frosted windows of The Monk’s dorm room casting a triangle of light across the floor. Now that I’ve been at Baldwin almost two weeks, and there haven’t been any visible catastrophes, Dad’s decided I can take the bus home any time I want to stay late, so I’m hanging out, reading The Metamorphosis on The Monk’s rumpled bed amid a swirl of blankets and notebooks. We are guzzling energy drinks, eating corn chips, and listening to Led Zeppelin on his vintage record player. Thomas A. Trowbridge the Fourth is sitting ramrod straight at his perfectly organized desk, trying to write. Led Zeppelin shakes the walls of the room, a wonderful pounding bouquet of angst.

  Thomas puts his hands over his ears and groans.

  The Monk turns up the volume. He leaps onto his bed and jams out on air guitar, biting his lower lip, narrowing his eyes, and pretending to slide into the high notes. Then he scissor-kicks from the bed, struts across the floor, and begins leaping around and playing vigorous make-believe chords in Thomas’s direction.

  “Do you mind?” says Thomas.

  “Do I mind what?”

  “Do you mind stopping, please? I’m trying to write.”

  “Oh. Dude. You’re trying to write. I’m so sorry.”

  “That’s okay, dude. Just try not to distract me while I’m working.”

  The word dude sounds bizarre coming from the small, tight lips of Thomas A. Trowbridge the Fourth. It rings unnaturally in the room the way it does when my dad tries to win me over by using teen lingo. No matter what words he uses, in the end he just winds up sounding kind of desperate.

  Thomas is too worried about his reputation with adults to ever use slang comfortably, even in his own room. It’s the downside of his legacy. He crosses to The Monk’s side, and in a fit of pique, yanks the arm of the vintage record player off the record with a hideously loud scratch.

  “Hey!” screams The Monk, snatching the scratched record off the turntable. “I can’t believe you did that, dude. This record is part of my collection.”

  “Everything is part of your stupid collection,” says Thomas, red-faced. “All your precious little oddities. Your weird friends. You’re obsessed with everything.”

  “I’m not obsessed with you,” says The Monk. He flops next to me, places the record gently on his pillow, and puts his arm around my shoulders. I try to squirm away, but he holds tight. “In fact, I couldn’t care less about you anymore. I tried to help you be cool. I staged a whole intervention. I introduced you to my people, took you under my wing. But you’re a lost cause, man. I’m into this guy now.”

  “Oh, of course,” says Thomas, narrowing his eyes. “I’m too boring for your collection, right? I’m not interesting enough for you?”

  “That’s right,” says The Monk. “I tried my best, but you give me no choice. I’m dropping you, man. I have decided you aren’t worth the effort. You are status quo. You are The Man. You are corporate greed, dude. You are the top one percent of the top one percent. You are everything that is wrong with the world.”

  “That’s a little harsh,” I tell The Monk.

  “Yes,” says Thomas. “Thank you.”

  The Monk tightens his grip on my shoulders.

  I continue to squirm.

  “See this guy?” The Monk asks, jabbing one finger into my chest. “Now this guy is worth collecting. He’s a nonconformist. And unlike you, he doesn’t give a shit about what people think of him. You, on the other hand, have sold out.”

  “I haven’t sold out,” says Thomas. “You keep saying that, and I want you to know it’s really starting to get to me.”

  “I just tell it like I see it,” says The Monk. “I gave you a chance. Now I’m done.”

  He finally lets me go. I move from his bed to his desk.

  The Monk picks up his record and wanders to the window to get a better look at the scratch. He rubs at it with his sleeve. “Jesus Christ,” he says. “Look at this thing. It’s totally ruined.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t swear in front of me,” says Thomas.

  “Jesus. Fucking. Christ.”

  Thomas puts his head in his hands.

  “Maybe you should give the guy a break,” I suggest.

  “I can’t,” says The Monk. “Picking on Thomas is part of my religion.”

  “You don’t know what religion is,” says Thomas into his hands.

  “Oh, so pious,” says The Monk.

  Thomas looks up.

  “He doesn’t let me come out with him and his buddies anymore,” Thomas tells me. “He invited me along at the beginning of the year, and we had some good times, but now he says I’m not welcome.” Thomas glares at The Monk.

  “That’s because you snitch on us,” says The Monk.

  “I only snitch when you break rules.”

  “Oh, so you’re admitting it now?”

  “Maybe,” says Thomas. “Maybe I’m admitting it. Maybe I’m not.”

  “You know what?” says The Monk. “I think I’m done with this conversation.”

  He puts the record back on the record player and turns it on. The psychedelic music pours into the room. You can hear the scratch below the bass line, a loud, frightening rip every time the record turns. Rip. Rip. Rip. The Monk frowns in Thomas’s direction, but he doesn’t jam and he doesn’t crank the volume. Thomas turns his face away. He goes back to his writing. But I can see the hurt in his shoulders, in his neck, and in the way he is trying to slow his breathing down. The Monk grabs my copy of The Metamorphosis and pretends to read. He turns pages furiously.

  We sit in silence for a few moments, but the air is almost too heavy to breathe. Finally, Thomas rises, red-faced, from his desk. He crosses the room and opens the door. He looks back at The Monk, maybe hoping an apology is coming his way, but The Monk does not look up. He turns so he is facing the wall instead. Thomas turns away too. His shoulders slump and he sighs, lingering for a moment in the doorway. Then he walks out of the room and slams the door behind him.

  “You weren’t very nice,” I tell The Monk.

  “You think?” The Monk mutters, still leafing through The Metamorphosis.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  The Monk looks up at me.

  “What if I told you he reported me to the dean of students a couple weeks ago.”

  “What? Why?”

  “For breaking curfew. Good old school rule number A-4. All licensed juniors and seniors in good academic standing have permission to operate registered motor vehicles off campus as outlined in transportation bylaws, blah blah blah, but all drivers and passengers must be signed back into dormitories no later than ten o’clock Sunday through Thursday and eleven o’clock on Friday and Saturday nights. Trowbridge has the whole frigging handbook memorized. You think I was too harsh? What if I told you they gave me a demerit because of him?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means if they catch me breaking curfew again I’m screwed.”

  SOPHOMORES ARE SOPHOMORIC AND OTHER TAUTOLOGIES

  I�
�m sitting on a bench in the boys’ field house lacing up my Converse All Star sneakers after gym. Boys are doing what they always do in locker rooms, even in progressive places like Baldwin. They are flexing their muscles, whipping each other in the butt with towels, and checking out their acne and their facial hair in tiny square mirrors over the sinks. They are boasting about their girlfriends, their field goals, and the cars they want to buy one day. Interestingly, because this is the Baldwin School and not my public high school, they are also making jokes about existential philosophers, discussing string theory, and practicing their Latin declensions. But this doesn’t do anything to mitigate the fight-or-flight feeling I always get as soon as I set foot in a locker room. Maybe it has to do with my concave chest and my enthusiastically detailed rib cage.

  The Monk is hanging out with a strange assortment of guys over by the lockers. There’s a heavyset kid with a shaved head, various piercings, and a Rage Against the Machine T-shirt, there’s a shifty-eyed kid with a Mohawk who speaks in a whisper and can’t stop snickering at everything anyone says, and then there’s this kid with a curly red fro who has shaved off his eyebrows and penciled them back in with black eyeliner. The Monk pounds the bald kid on the back. Then he fist bumps the kid with the eyeliner, who tries to grab his fist and push him backward, but The Monk yanks his fist away, and because he’s so tall the kid can’t even reach him. They scuffle and tackle each other and crash against the lockers. Other kids stare warily at them and then move silently away.

  The Monk spots me and motions for me to come over. I think about doing it, because these guys just might be weird enough not to ignore me the way so many kids at the public school did, but the tumor is drinking beer and making snide remarks about why I suck, so I stay put and pretend I don’t notice the invitation. I concentrate on my shoelaces.

  The Monk strides over to where I’m sitting and slides in beside me.

  “Dude!” he says.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “You don’t look so good.”

  “I don’t?”

  “No,” says The Monk. “You’re kind of pale.”

  “Yes, well,” I say. “Winter and being Caucasian and all that.”

  “Come meet my buddies,” says the Monk.

  The tumor kicks the back of my eye with his boot.

  “Nah,” I say. “I have to study for a quiz.”

  “You should meet these guys,” says The Monk. “They’re quality.”

  I look over. The curly-red-haired one is waving at me. I raise a hand to them, and then look back at my sneakers.

  “Holy crap,” says The Monk. “We need to do something about your antisocial behavior. Look at you. I threw you a lifeline and you totally ignored it, dude. What’s with that? You want to drown? You want to get eaten by sharks? I have to tell you, as your student fellow and your friend who sees your potential coolness, that is extremely pathetic behavior.”

  “So now I’m pale and pathetic?”

  “Yes,” says The Monk. “You are.”

  “Great,” I say. “Thank you.”

  “I just tell it how I see it.”

  “Shut up,” I say.

  “Now you are just being rude,” says The Monk.

  “Oh,” I say. “Pale, pathetic, and rude. Anything else?”

  The Monk puts his face in my face. “You are also infuriating. Has anyone ever told you that? You are in a pit. You need to dig yourself out right now. You need to frigging do something, dude. Snap out of it. Snap out of it, dude!”

  The Monk grabs me by my ears.

  “Please stop,” I say.

  “No,” he says. “I’m not going to stop. Not until you promise to change your attitude. Otherwise I’m going to shake you until your scrambled brain comes out of your asshole. You think I’m joking? You think I won’t do it?”

  The Monk grins at me insanely and shakes my ears to prove his point.

  I have never had someone shake me by my ears before. Ears are not meant to be used as handles. The skin on the earlobes is sensitive. It does not appreciate fingernails. The harder he shakes, the harder the tumor crashes into the walls of my brain. The tumor is getting pissed off. He doesn’t like crashing into walls unless he is doing it on purpose in a mosh pit with a crowd of gorgeous women. My brain, despite all the pounding noise, is most definitely not a mosh pit.

  The Monk gets up from the bench to get a better grip on my ears.

  “Stop,” I say. “You’re hurting me.”

  “That is the point!” says The Monk.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Okay, what?” says The Monk.

  “Okay, I’ll try to be less pathetic.”

  “And less rude?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Yes. Less rude. And less pale.”

  The Monk lets go of my ears.

  “Good man,” he says, sitting back down.

  “Good God,” I say.

  I slump forward.

  “You shouldn’t get me aggravated like that,” says The Monk.

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “So will you meet my buddies?”

  “Sure,” I mutter, rubbing my ears. “Anything you say.”

  “Guys!” shouts The Monk, turning around toward the lockers where the misfits were standing not moments before, but they are already hustling out the door, one after another. First the bald one, then the shifty-eyed one with the Mohawk, then the curly-red-haired one with the eyebrows. We watch the door to the locker room close behind them.

  “Damn,” says The Monk. “You scared them away.”

  “You think?”

  “Yeah. They’re definitely frightened. ’Cause of all that ruckus you made while I was shaking the snot out of you. But don’t worry, dude. There will be other chances. In fact I have an idea. I have an awesomely wonderful idea. This is gonna be great. I can’t believe how perfect this is. I am a genius.”

  “What,” I say.

  “A week from Friday we’re auditioning for Hamlet. All of us. You need to be part of this, dude. I can see it.”

  “No thank you,” I say. “Theater’s not my thing.”

  “You think I didn’t know that?” says The Monk. “You keep underestimating my brilliance. Which pisses me off. I know theater isn’t your thing. You can barely talk to me. You think I don’t know you wouldn’t be comfortable talking to an auditorium full of people? I get it. But listen, dude. I think you are in great need of getting out of your comfort zone, okay? You need to get out of this rut. Plus you promised to be less lame. So no more conversation is necessary. You’re doing this.”

  “You’re wrong about something,” I tell him.

  “No,” he says. “I’m not. I have you figured out, dude.”

  “You don’t. I’m never in my comfort zone. So cut me some slack.”

  “No slack,” says The Monk. “Auditions. After school. A week from Friday. My buddies will be trying out. Fish’ll be there too. You know Fish, right? From our World Lit class? With the hair?”

  I feel my face flush.

  “Yeah,” I mutter. “I know her.”

  “Good,” says The Monk. “She’s part of my collection. It’s always good to have a girl in your collection. Just in case.” He winks at me.

  He checks his phone. “Shit,” he says. “I gotta go.” And then, without waiting to hear what I have to say about his proposition, he swings his backpack onto his shoulder, starts texting furiously, and strides away.

  I watch him head past the lockers and toward the door, which swings back and shuts so that I am left alone to think about what he said.

  If I was in the play, I would have a chance to spend more time with Fish and that would be worth it. But would someone as amazing and beautiful as Fish ever really notice someone as pathetic as me?

  I sit alone on the bench with my concave chest and my shard and my tumor and my pathetic, pathetic sadness leaning against my eyelids, breathing in the ghosts of a thousand generations of boys so filled with sweat and acne and h
ormones and optimism, so filled with expectations of health and years on this earth, it makes me want to fall to my knees and pray, even though I haven’t prayed since I was five years old. Dear God, if you are up there, please help me find the courage to try out for this play so I can hang out with this gorgeous pink-haired girl named Fish who you have placed on this earth in your infinite, twisted wisdom, and may I one day have the chance and the guts to kiss her. Amen.

  The tumor only laughs.

  TRUST FALL

  The auditorium smells like old paint, frayed ropes, moth-eaten velvet curtains, and about a hundred generations of dusty costumes. It’s not an unpleasant odor. If you’ve ever been onstage, you know exactly what I mean. It smells like folding chairs, like the insides of violin cases, like cast-iron music stands, yellowed scripts, clipboards, sandbags, and the sweat of hopeful understudies.

  We sit in a circle of chairs on the stage and wait for the director to arrive. The Monk introduces me to the misfits, who clearly remember me from the locker room incident, because they crack up when they see me, and the bald kid grabs the curly-red-haired kid’s ears and starts shaking them, which I don’t find very funny. The bald one’s name is Smitty. He is wearing a Green Day T-shirt and black combat boots and black skinny jeans that are way too tight on him and he has disks in his ears and he speaks in this crazy booming voice that carries over the stage as though he were God. The shifty-eyed one with the Mohawk is Griswald. Griswald doesn’t seem to talk, but he snickers at everything anyone says as though every utterance contains a sexual innuendo. Finally, there is Ravi, the kid with the red fro and the shaved eyebrows who gesticulates madly with both hands and pokes at people’s chests for emphasis but no one seems to mind because he is amusing. Dude, says The Monk. Tell Max why your parents named you Ravi. Because they are hippie wannabees, that’s why, says Ravi, flashing double peace signs. Plus they worship Ravi Shankar, who happens to be the sexiest sitar player who has ever existed. Peace and love, dude, man. Don’t trust anyone over the age of thirty.

  And then of course, there’s Fish.

  Fish is wearing black combat boots and black leggings and a ripped black Dead Kennedys T-shirt held closed at various places by safety pins. The scar on her arm looks even whiter against all the black clothing.