by Chris Lynch
“Well, I wasn’t, but thank—”
“Jesus, Mick, are you sick? Where is everybody?” He stopped, reached down on the floor, and picked up a brown half-moon-shaped something. “Jesus Christ, is this a hamburger? Isn’t anyone taking care of you?”
“I’m not sick.” Suddenly I felt defensive, angry. “They’re all out working right now. Shoppin’, maybe. My mother brings me in food. The other night my father asked me, from the other side of the door, if I wanted him to wheel in the TV for a couple of hours. So you see I’m taken good care of, thank you very much.”
Maybe that was a good thing to tell him, because when I said it he stopped picking on me. He just sighed and slapped his thighs loudly with his hands.
“You really don’t look well, Mick,” Evelyn said, brushing past Toy. She came close and raised my chin with two fingers. She was so warm, not that she had any special feeling for me, but because she was one of those people who cannot ignore hurt things—even if she does try to make exceptions. She was so beautiful, she made me want to hurt myself.
“Can I have my pills back?” I said flatly to Toy.
He reached right over Evelyn and grabbed me. With his big hand he seized me by the neck, his thumb pressing on my jugular, two fingers squeezing, crackling the vertebrae in back. I let out a small scream.
“Toy, don’t!” Evelyn yelled. She grabbed at his arm and I saw her nails sink into the underside of his biceps, the part that should be soft but on Toy wasn’t. “You’re hurting him, Toy, stop it.”
She kept trying but he moved as if she weren’t even there, dragging us both down the hall. When we reached the bathroom he shoved me inside, flipped on the light, and jammed my face into the mirror.
“Look at that garbage,” he said.
I hadn’t looked in a mirror in a while. Not since the weekend, probably. Not on purpose though—it just wasn’t something I did very often.
My eye sockets were deep and black, my skin was blotchy, off-white, and chalky. My hair stood straight up in the air on the left side and in front, and lay pasted to my head everywhere else. It was all matted together in lumps and shiny with oil. My teeth were dark.
“Hot damn, I look like Keith Richards,” I said, snarling and bobbing my head at myself.
“Fool,” Toy snapped. “The right response is supposed to be ‘Oh my god, I look like Keith Richards.’ It’s not really a good thing.”
“Would you lighten up for once,” I said, turning away from the mirror.
“You big spoiled baby,” he said, blocking me from leaving the bathroom. “I finally realize, you have no problems that you don’t make up all by yourself.” He hesitated, his lips pulling in tighter, harder, as he struggled for words. He looked straight up at the ceiling, then back toward Evelyn, as if she could make it come out clearer. Suddenly his face whipped back around to me. “You have no right,” he finally said quietly. “No right. You have no business. You have everything.” He let me go and shoved me backward at the same time. “You make me sick.” With that, Toy stomped down the hall and out of my house.
I was thinking about what he said, agreeing with him, but at the same time missing the pills he’d just taken away. As I headed to the kitchen for an eye-opener, I bumped into Evelyn. She had stayed. My heart started beating again.
“He’s so intense,” I said, shrugging.
She folded her arms. “I think it’s your self-pity, self-absorption, self-flagellation, self-mutilation, all that self-stuff that Toy can’t relate to.”
“Huh?”
“Grow up.”
“Oh. I get it.” Not that I actually did. “Where was he all that time, Evelyn?”
She shook her head sadly. “I don’t know. He doesn’t say.” Evelyn started walking down the hall toward the door, and I followed her.
“He certainly came back with a stick up his ass,” I said.
She shook her head. “What is it like for you, to live every moment entirely beside the point?”
“You like me, I know it.”
“Good-bye, Boca Loca,” she said.
“Wait,” I said as she started down the stairs. Suddenly none of it seemed funny anymore. I was very nearly alone. “Could you stay with me for a while?”
“No. I have to go to school.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s right, I forgot. I’ll be going. Next week, I’ll be going again.” I was mumbling by the end of it, backing away from the door, thinking already about the refrigerator.
“Don’t do what you’re thinking about,” she said, shooting her arm straight out from the shoulder and pointing at me. As if she knew exactly. It gave me a shudder. She sat down on the top step, and I came out to join her.
“I only have a couple of minutes, then I really have to go.”
“I know. That’s okay.”
“He seems to really like you. Toy, that is. For some reason.”
“I like that. I mean, even if he’s yelling at me and calling me garbage, there’s something I like about it.”
Evelyn nodded, looking out at the street.
“How about you... Evelyn?” I asked as timidly as I could without snuffling around her ankles. “Could you? Do you think? Like me?”
She squared around to look at me. My heart sank as I saw my rotten face reflected back at me again, in her black eyes.
“No, I don’t think so. I mean, anything’s possible. But I don’t think so.”
She stood up, started down the stairs again. I remained slumped on the step, head dropped, staring into my crotch, staring at the same cutoff denims and same yellow-white T-shirt I’d been wearing since... when?
“Maybe,” she called back, snapping me right out of it, “I could take another look. Maybe, you could bathe. Maybe, you could get some vitamin A into yourself. Maybe, you could detoxify by the time school’s out this afternoon...”
I jumped up and called, much too loud to be cool at all, “Maybe.”
As she slinked that confident, slinky walk down the street, I grabbed my head with both hands. The jump had done the screwy thing to my circulation again, making me teeter. And I smiled so hard my dead face muscles ripped me with a sensational pain.
I showered with lavender soap, my mother’s Jean Nate shower splash, and dandruff shampoo that felt like battery acid seeping into my scalp. I worked a big gob of some spermy hair conditioner through my hair, clipped my curling, doglike toenails, and baby powdered all my problem areas. I even shaved, even though I was a couple of weeks shy of needing to, just so she could see and smell the effort of the blood on my neck and the lime Edge gel in the air.
Two hours before school was out, I was ready, sweating, thirsty, my stomach all flippy. I sat, nibbled saltines, sipped ginger ale, changed my shirt twice, watched Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Andy Griffith.
When Evelyn walked up to the house, I sat on the front steps shining dully like a pearl.
She laughed out loud.
“I’m goin’ in the house, dammit,” I said.
“No, no, no,” she said, grabbing my hand and putting my little fire right out. “I didn’t mean to make fun. I think this is nice. You do smell like about twelve different things, but each and every one of them is better than what you smelled like before. Truly, I’m moved.”
Truly or not, I bought it. “Where should we go?” I asked.
“The museum.”
“The museum? You’re taking me, to the museum?”
“Well, I’m not taking you anywhere. I’m going to the museum, and you seem to want to go someplace with me, so there we are. You don’t have to go.”
“No, I want to, I want to. I was there before. Eighth-grade field trip. Had a swell time. It was colorful, I remember.”
“Ah, yes,” she said, smirking, “that’s the place.”
The museum looked like a neat clean prison, with its tall slitlike barred windows, concrete everywhere, flat roof where there might be armed guards planted on all corners. High above the main entranc
e hung a massive banner with pictures of round cupids flying over a sign that read THE AGE OF RUBENS. The cupids were shooting arrows downward, and my eyes followed, down to where the arrows would land, down to the broad front lawn of the grounds, where they would lodge if they were real arrows, which they weren’t, and if the cupids were real, which they weren’t, into the back of the crying Indian who lives there on the lawn on his horse. I pass that Indian a couple of thousand times a year and I look at it maybe ten. Because it does something to me and I don’t like what it does to me. He has a full headdress on and it’s falling down his back as he stares straight up at the sky. His hands are pointing straight down at his sides, his palms facing us on the street. He might be crying, which is why I call him the crying Indian. He might be screaming. He might be laughing, but he doesn’t feel like a laughing statue. He might just be soaking up the rain, or the snow that lies on his naked arms so much of the year and makes me feel stung frozen and hollowed out just to look at him.
The Indian stood there when the big banner said RENOIR. He stood there when it said DEGAS. And when it said GOYA, and THE SECRETS OF THE EGYPTIANS, and EAKINS, and THE WATERCOLORS. But I never had even a little bit of interest in walking past the crying Indian to go see any of it.
I wasn’t aware that I had stopped walking. “You going home, you staying there, or you coming in?” Evelyn asked.
It’s different when you’re an eighth-grade kid, though, isn’t it? Everybody was stupid and ignorant then, so it wasn’t a problem.
But it was a problem now. I couldn’t go in there now, with Evelyn, and have her see. She belonged in there. I belonged out on the lawn with the Indian.
“To tell you the truth, Evelyn,” I said, “I don’t really go for angels that much.”
“Cherubs,” she said. “They’re called cherubs.”
Exactly, I thought.
“Right,” I said. “But I’m starting to feel a little run down. Still recovering, you know.”
“Oh,” she said. “You going to be all right?”
“Sure, it’s just, I just don’t want to hold you back.”
Evelyn nodded, I nodded. She went her way, inside. I went back my way. I spent a few minutes with the Indian before going home.
At least she got me to bathe.
A Biography of Chris Lynch
Chris Lynch (b. 1962) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the fifth of seven children. His father, Edward J. Lynch, was a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority bus and trolley driver, and his mother, Dorothy, was a stay-at-home mom. Lynch’s father passed away in 1967, when Lynch was just five years old. Along with her children, Dorothy was left with an old, black Rambler American car and no driver’s license. She eventually got her license, and raised her children as a single mother.
Lynch grew up in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood, and recalls his childhood ambitions to become a hockey player (magically, without learning to ice skate properly), president of the United States, and/or a “rock and roll god.” He attended Catholic Memorial School in West Roxbury, before heading off to Boston University, neglecting to first earn his high school diploma. He later transferred to Suffolk University, where he majored in journalism, and eventually received an MA from the writing program at Emerson College. Before becoming a writer, Lynch worked as a furniture mover, truck driver, house painter, and proofreader. He began writing fiction around 1989, and his first book, Shadow Boxer, was published in 1993. “I could not have a more perfect job for me than writer,” he says. “Other than not managing to voluntarily read a work of fiction until I was at university, this gig and I were made for each other. One might say I was a reluctant reader, which surely informs my work still.”
In 1989, Lynch married, and later had two children, Sophia and Walker. The family moved to Roslindale, Massachusetts, where they lived for seven years. In 1996, Lynch moved his family to Ireland, his father’s birthplace, where Lynch has dual citizenship. After a few years in Ireland, he separated from his wife and met his current partner, Jules. In 1998, Jules and her son, Dylan, joined in the adventure when Lynch, Sophia, and Walker sailed to southwest Scotland, which remains the family’s base to this day. In 2010, Sophia had a son, Jackson, Lynch’s first grandchild.
When his children were very young, Lynch would work at home, catching odd bits of available time to write. Now that his children are grown, he leaves the house to work, often writing in local libraries and “acting more like I have a regular nine-to-five(ish) job.”
Lynch has written more than twenty-five books for young readers, including Inexcusable (2005), a National Book Award finalist; Freewill (2001), which won a Michael L. Printz Honor; and several novels cited as ALA Best Books for Young Adults, including Gold Dust (2000) and Slot Machine (1995).
Lynch’s books are known for capturing the reality of teen life and experiences, and often center on adolescent male protagonists. “In voice and outlook,” Lynch says, “Elvin Bishop [in the novels Slot Machine; Extreme Elvin; and Me, Dead Dad, and Alcatraz] is the closest I have come to representing myself in a character.” Many of Lynch’s stories deal with intense, coming-of-age subject matters. The Blue-Eyed Son trilogy was particularly hard for him to write, because it explores an urban world riddled with race, fear, hate, violence, and small-mindedness. He describes the series as “critical of humanity in a lot of ways that I’m still not terribly comfortable thinking about. But that’s what novelists are supposed to do: get uncomfortable and still be able to find hope. I think the books do that. I hope they do.”
Lynch’s He-Man Women Haters Club series takes a more lighthearted tone. These books were inspired by the club of the same name in the Little Rascals film and TV show. Just as in the Little Rascals’ club, says Lynch, “membership is really about classic male lunkheadedness, inadequacy in dealing with girls, and with many subjects almost always hiding behind the more macho word hate when we cannot admit that it’s fear.”
Today, Lynch splits his time between Scotland and the US, where he teaches in the MFA creative writing program at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His life motto continues to be “shut up and write.”
Lynch, age twenty, wearing a soccer shirt from a team he played with while living in Jamaica Plain, Boston.
Lynch with his daughter, Sophia, and son, Walker, in Scotland’s Cairngorm Mountains in 2002.
Lynch at the National Book Awards in 2005. From left to right: Lynch’s brother Brian; his mother, Dot; Lynch; and his brother E.J.
Lynch with his family at Edinburgh’s Salisbury Crags at Hollyrood Park in 2005. From left to right: Lynch’s daughter, Sophia; niece Kim; Lynch; his son, Walker; his partner, Jules, and her son, Dylan; and Lynch’s brother E.J.
In 2009, Lynch spoke at a Massachusetts grade school and told the story of Sister Elizabeth of Blessed Sacrament School in Jamaica Plain, the only teacher he had who would “encourage a proper, liberating, creative approach to writing.” A serious boy came up to Lynch after his talk, handed him this paper origami nun, and said, “I thought you should have a nun. Her name is Sister Elizabeth.” Sister Elizabeth hangs in Lynch’s car to this day.
Lynch and his “champion mystery multibreed knuckleheaded hound,” Dexter, at home in Scotland in 2011. Says Lynch, “Dexter and I often put our heads together to try and fathom an unfathomable world.” Though Dexter lives with him, Lynch is allergic to dogs, and survives by petting Dexter with his feet and washing his hands multiple times a day!
Lynch never makes a move without first consulting with his trusted advisor and grandson, Jackson. This photo was taken in 2012, when Jackson was two years old, in Lynch’s home in Coylton, South Ayrshire, Scotland. Lynch later discovered his house was locally known as “the Hangman’s Cottage” because of the occupation of one of its earliest residents. One of his novels, The Gravedigger’s Cottage, is loosely based on this house.
Lynch dressed up as Wolverine for Halloween in 2012.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-Ameri
can Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1996 by Chris Lynch
cover design by Elizabeth Connor
978-1-4804-0451-9
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
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