Us Kids Know

by JJ Strong

  I stood with the ball, awaiting further instruction. Coach T. bit her lower lip and glared at all of us. Oh no, I thought. Please scapegoat me. Scream at me. Call me names. Shame me back into line and summon someone else. Please, please, please, I thought. Punish me. Only me.

  Coach T. spit and wiped her mouth and then, in a voice that was at once quiet and forceful, said, “On the line.”

  One or two girls groaned.

  “On the line!”

  We ran sprint after sprint, even as the sun went down and rain started to fall and the temperature dropped so low you could see your own breath. We ran until we were just short of collapsing, and then we ran some more. It was not lost on anyone that this was entirely my fault.

  Practice went so late that nobody bothered to shower. With sticky hair and muddy knees, I hopped into Meghan Ngyuen’s Jetta—the Jetta her parents had bought her for her seventeenth birthday and that she’d named, because of some inside joke I was never privy to, Chunky Tuna—and we pulled away, speeding home through a light drizzle so that Meghan could study for an upcoming AP European history test.

  The trip took us from school to Green Valley Road in Rosewood through dark and forested streets. We didn’t talk. It wasn’t like we were very close friends, but we’d lived down the street from each other our whole lives, so on most nights we were at least friendly. Tonight she navigated the slick, winding streets without so much as looking at me. A Dave Matthews CD played quietly. I nodded my head like I was enjoying the song, in what I hoped was a subtle attempt at solidarity, but in truth, even though this music and all it suggested—carefree days, sunshine, flirting with boys, bonfires on the beach, green grass, bare legs—was almost a prerequisite for admission to Marymount, I couldn’t help but find it frivolous.

  The rain fell harder. As we sailed down the hill into the dark, quiet streets of Rosewood, a large figure materialized from under a street lamp for the briefest moment—too brief for Meghan to brake in time. Too brief for her to do anything but pipe out a terrified yelp and yank on the wheel as the figure—a man—collided with the hood, smashed into the windshield, and flipped over the roof, out of view.

  The car was tossed across the slippery street, wheeling around what felt like a million times, then jumping the curb and skidding across a muddy, overgrown yard, slamming into the front stoop of a house and stopping, finally, thankfully, just before its front door.

  This all became clear to me later, of course. At the time all I processed was the man, the whooshing of the sailing car, the quick crack of my skull against the window, and the hollow humming in my head that followed.

  When it was over, Meghan was breathing heavily, looking at me, eyes wide and stunned. I wiped a trickle of blood inching down my temple and felt an odd calm. Adrenaline must have been surging through me, obscuring the pain I would later feel, but I wasn’t panicked. I stepped out of the car and felt like I was in a dream. I eyed the obliterated stoop—which I would later learn was Cullen’s stoop—and the ruined yard . . . Cullen’s yard. And the man lying in the road? Cullen Hickson himself. He’d propped himself up on an elbow, legs crossed, like he was mocking the pose of a sweater model. His face was scraped and bloody, his jeans shredded, also bloody. One of his shoes was missing, and he was clutching his left wrist. He was in pain, anyone could see that, yet he looked somehow amused. He wasn’t smiling, exactly, but he looked . . . contented. And not at all surprised. As though he’d been waiting for this moment his whole life.

  Ray

  AT SCHOOL, my locker was next to Nick O’Dwyer’s—a stocky guy from the Ironbound section of Newark with a cauliflowered ear and a gold crucifix around his neck. One day during the second week of school—before Cullen and before the stolen-car business—Nick and a bunch of other guys were crowded around his locker before class.

  As I approached, I thought about asking them to move, but at the last moment I chickened out and tried to squeeze through without so much as a whisper. I thought maybe they’d seen me coming and would clear a path. Instead, I ended up squirming between them, my face rubbing painfully against a canvas backpack as I tried to push through to freedom without disturbing anyone, worming my way forward, burrowing my head in my open locker to retrieve my books.

  “Anyway,” one of the guys was saying, “I’ll catch you later.”

  “Where you headed?”

  “Downstairs. Bible class with the boy fondler.”

  “Yo, Father Joe’s my boy.” Nick slammed his locker shut and checked the lock.

  “I’m just messin’ around.”

  “Whatever,” Nick said. “Don’t talk shit about him like that.”

  The group had started to disperse, so I lifted my head from the darkness of my locker.

  “I like that class,” I said.

  I don’t know why I said it. They were big guys who all knew each other from football—it’s not like I thought we were all going to be friends. I wasn’t even expecting a response. It was just a reflex. Early days at a new school—what was the harm in trying to engage with my fellow freshmen?

  “Huh?” Nick said.

  They were all looking at me. They had been seconds away from walking away to class without even noticing I was there, but now they were looking at me, waiting for a response. And I got the distinct impression that whatever response I gave would be the wrong one.

  “Father Joe,” I said. “I was just saying, I like that class too.”

  Nick gave a look to the other guys, who held back laughter. I turned to grab a history book. The locker door smacked into the side of my head.

  “Oh shit!” Nick cried out. “My bad.” He turned to his friends and grinned. “I tripped.”

  So that was the first time. There would be many more. Nick was very big—he had huge shoulders and rough hands and looked like he could grow a beard at a moment’s notice. I weighed ninety-nine pounds, my voice sounded precisely the same as it always had, and my body featured very little hair in any of the places a freshman boy is supposed to have grown hair. These essential truths, as far as I could tell, necessitated that Nick kick my ass or otherwise humiliate me whenever I failed to escape his sights. Except not in any ordinary way. At an all-boys high school, kids like Nick O’Dwyer don’t have to worry about what girls will think of the way they torment kids like me. So when I changed before gym, he’d grab my nipples until I screamed in pain and fell to the floor with everyone watching. He’d grab me by the back of my hair while I was pulling up my shorts and make me stand there while he slapped his enormous hand across my bare ass so violently I could hardly sit down for the whole rest of the day. Sometimes he’d sneak up on me in the hallway and smack me in the balls or just grab them really hard and squeeze. Maybe stuff like that happens at normal high schools too; I wouldn’t know. It didn’t happen in seventh or eighth grades, though, when I was still in public school. In any case, it was a shitty introduction to St. John’s, and it resulted in a lot of strategic maneuvering through the halls on my part. I forced myself to be either very late or very early for every class so that I could arrive at my locker before Nick showed up to retrieve some forgotten book and administer his daily shot of abuse. I started wearing gym shorts under my khakis so I could change more quickly in the locker room, but once Nick caught on to this, it only gave him more reason to come after me.

  That’s when he started what he called his “warm-ups” for gym, which meant using me as a punching bag before class. With dozens of hot, purple bruises all over my arms, I resorted to changing clothes in a stall of the second-floor bathroom so I didn’t have to show up in the gym locker room at all.

  The funny thing was that even though I hated every second I spent in his company, for a while Nick was pretty much the only guy at school with whom I interacted. Everyone else ignored me. And so, finding myself without any friends at all, I was left with a lot of alone time. Time to aimlessly roam the halls. Time to w
atch one New Jersey town after another flick by on the bus back and forth from school. Time to hang around in my bedroom in the afternoons rather than meet up with the other kids in my grade who were out in the world doing things I could only imagine—creating mischief, drinking beer, going to parties, talking to girls, touching girls, kissing girls. And so in those halls, and on that bus, and in that room, all I did was think. I thought about myself. And the world. And the fact that I, like every other person in the world, was alone. And would someday die.

  I thought about God too—the idea that some unseen Thing was watching me, was interested in me, and was reserving a place for me in a magical world where I would go when I died and disappeared from this world. And for the first time in my life, I realized I’d never actually been given a single satisfying reason to believe in all this.

  In response to these developments, I quickly swore off any attempts at normalcy. I wasn’t going to sit around and wait for the day when my dick would grow to a respectable size and my shoulders would fill out and my Adam’s apple would finally surface (From where? I wondered. Where in my xylophone neck was a thing like that hiding?). I wouldn’t seek out things that weren’t meant to be mine—things that, probably because I couldn’t have them, I decided were beneath me: Friends. Popularity. Girls. Sports. Sex.

  I wanted more. If God was really out there, there had to be a way to find Him. So I started searching.

  I read St. Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine says, “If the things of this world delight you, praise God for them but turn your love away from them and give it to their Maker.” So I tossed away my stereo and untacked the posters of Derek Jeter and assorted supermodels from my bedroom wall. I unplugged my thirteen-inch television and PlayStation 2 and left them on the curb, ripped up the carpet in the corner where I used to waste countless hours on Madden and Gran Turismo, and laid down a straw mat for meditating. Beyond these few possessions, it wasn’t all that hard to rid myself of “the things of this world” because I only felt vaguely connected to them to begin with. Which was probably a big part of the problem in the first place: If I were more interested in what other kids were interested in—Britney Spears and Eminem and TRL and hemp necklaces and cell phones and whatever else—maybe none of this would have ever happened. But even when I listened to that music or watched those shows, whatever sensation I was supposed to feel never arrived. They seemed to be speaking a language I didn’t understand and had no interest in learning. Like I was missing the part of my brain that made me a real teenager. Mom said once that until me, she’d never known a kid who didn’t like candy. And as for cell phones, well . . . who was I going to call?

  I started reading this book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Every day after school, I tried and failed over and over to balance on my head, to keep my back tree-trunk straight during hour-long attempts at meditation. When I finished with Zen Mind, I moved on to the Bible. Augustine says, “We are too weak to discover the truth by reason alone, and for this reason you need the authority of sacred books.” So I read for myself all those Sunday school tales that I’d never really paid attention to the first time around, and I found that God in the Bible was loud and certain. Some agreed with his words and some disagreed, but I couldn’t stand how everyone heard the words. I turned to Buddhist texts and found the same problem. God was this and God was that, but God was, in all of these books, around. I couldn’t find a word about the silence I encountered every time I propped up on my mat and listened for Him.

  I moved from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas. Even though I could hardly understand what Aquinas was saying—I usually read one paragraph six or seven times before I could make out even a glimpse of a clear idea—I still liked reading it. Sometimes I just liked to hold the book in my hands. It made me feel like whatever I was doing mattered. Like I wasn’t crazy and I wasn’t a loser, because someone else had once done what I was doing.

  Still, Aquinas’s answers, when I could make them out, didn’t help all that much. “As fire,” Aquinas said, “which is the maximum of heat, is the cause of all hot things . . . there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.” Must, he says. Yeah, okay. Must.

  But where?

  I’d always been a reliable student, mostly out of a willingness to do exactly what I was told rather than because of any profound, earth-shattering intellect, but when I started listening for God, I pretty much stopped doing my schoolwork altogether. So it wasn’t all that surprising to me when an early progress report showed four Ds and two Fs. It certainly came as a shock to Dad, though. He did that thing he did when he was upset, pressing his lips together and avoiding eye contact, leaving you there to stew in the silence.

  We were sitting at the kitchen table, Dad fiddling with the report card in his hands. When I couldn’t take the silence anymore, I asked him why I couldn’t study what I wanted to study rather than what some group of people who didn’t even know me and who would never meet me had decided I should study.

  “What do you want to study?” Dad said.

  “God,” I told him.

  He put the report card on the table, lining up its edges with the table’s corner. I suddenly felt like I’d said too much. I didn’t want to be there anymore, and I didn’t want to discuss all the things I was thinking about with him.

  “Okay,” he said. “Explain why searching for God means four Ds and two Fs.”

  I shrugged my shoulders and limped my head to show that I didn’t feel like talking anymore. I was ready to retreat to my room, where I could feel like the only person in the world.

  “What have you found in your search?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You don’t believe in God?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Doubt is good, Ray.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

  He flipped the progress report between his fingers. “God is everywhere. It’s hard to know that, but it’s true. He’s in school too. He’s in homework, in tests, quizzes, and essays. Working at life is searching for God.”

  His eyes locked on mine. Dad was a psychiatrist, and sometimes he’d look at me the way I imagined he looked at his clients—like he was gazing down a well after tossing a coin, hoping for a miraculous splash of light when the penny hit water down in the darkness.

  “You understand?”

  I nodded.

  “It takes time,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “If looking for God is that important to you, you could start coming to church with me again.”

  “Okay.”

  “Would you like to do that?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I want to,” I said. I did want to, but somehow the words weren’t coming out right. I couldn’t make them sound sincere. “I’ll go with you.”

  “In the meantime, we have work to do. And this”—he flapped the progress report in front of me—“this won’t do.”

  He rose and stepped toward the door, dropping the report on the table as he passed. He stopped at the threshold, pressing his palms against either side of the doorway. I could tell that he was waiting for me to say something. He gave me the look parents give you when they want you to know that if you have anything to ask them—anything at all—now’s the time to do it. But it’s always at those moments when you can’t think of a single question, isn’t it? You know they’re in there somewhere—a whole list of them that you’ve studied over and over, waiting for the time when you can finally start firing away. But then the moment comes and you forget your lines, and all you can do is say something pointless, something that barely even means anything at all. Something like “Sorry, Dad,” which is what I said as he stood there leaning against the wall, before he finally tapped his knuckles twice against the doorway’s panel
ing and disappeared.

  * * *

  The next day during gym class, Nick shoved me down a hill. We were running laps around the soccer field, which was bordered by steeply sloping woods on one side. I was struggling—on lap six of eight, drenched in sweat, heaving breaths, barely able to keep my arms up at my sides. Coach Fritz was at the far end of the field by the bleachers, facing the opposite direction from us, one hand on his hip and the other twirling a whistle around his finger. Last year, if you had been standing at the top of those bleachers at the right time of day, facing New York, the towers might have appeared as hazy forms above trees. But not anymore.

  It happened quickly. I heard a sound behind me like a stampede of elephants. Then, in what seemed like a single motion, my shorts were tugged down to my ankles, and before I even had time to trip over them, something—fist? foot? head?—speared me in the back. I plunged down the muddy hill to my left, pantsless, breathless, grasping at roots and branches until I smacked into the brambles of a thornbush. The thorns stuck me all over. I heard a high-pitched cawing of laughter from above while I thrashed out of the thorns, snared pieces of skin stretching and then breaking and bleeding as I pulled away. I hoped nobody would come down to help me and then, when nobody came, wished someone had and hated myself for feeling like that.

  From far off, Coach Fritz’s whistle piped out a single, meaningless note.

  I pulled up my shorts. Eyed the hill. I’d fallen a long way in a short amount of time. In the other direction, thirty yards down the hill, a car pulled into the school’s parking lot.

  I don’t know why in the world I thought that would be a good time to meditate, but I wasn’t about to climb up the stupid hill and subject myself to another thirty minutes of humiliation, and I couldn’t very well go roam the halls when I was supposed to be in class. So I situated myself, legs crossed, beneath a mossy, rotting oak tree stump. I tried to wipe the blood and mud from my legs, but all I did was mix the two together into a dark-colored, slippery mess. Each little wound felt like someone was holding a lit match to my skin.