Tonight We Rule the World

by Zack Smedley

  You know? Because all I could keep thinking is … I miss you, dude. And to me, that’s the important part. I keep wanting to find a wand I can wave that’ll just take me back to before.”

  I swallow and add, “That’s how I feel too.”

  “Right!” Her eyes light up. “So let’s do that! There’s no reason we can’t just forget about it—not a word to anyone. Okay. So, correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like we’re on the same page. Yeah? Relationship Reset?”

  This is my window. The chance for me to tell her to go to hell with her little plan, to insist that we do spend hours dissecting exactly what each of us did wrong, because I’m almost positive I would come out ahead.

  Relationship Reset.

  “I might be okay with trying that,” I say. Cautious. “But I have a condition.” Stay in control. “Anything.”

  “You take ‘no’ for an answer. It doesn’t matter what it is. Whether it’s a wreath, or how I want my hair cut, or anything sex-wise, period. If I don’t want to do something, it doesn’t happen, and you don’t make a big deal about it.”

  “Done.” She’s grinning at me from ear to ear, sitting up on her heels now. She slides her way toward me on the couch, raising an eyebrow and saying, “Let’s test it… . Is this okay?”

  I nod.

  “Is this okay?” She’s straddling me now.

  I nod. Then, I let her kiss me. And I kiss her back. We grab each other and moan into each other’s mouths, releasing nearly three weeks’ worth of pent-up feelings. And it’s only a couple of hours later, long after she’s left, that I realize: The only thing I set out to get—an admission of guilt—is the only thing I didn’t get.

  FOUR

  THANK GOD LILY AND I HAVE WORKED THINGS OUT.

  Come Monday, I rejoin the group in carpooling to school instead of taking the bus like I had for the past few weeks. For a minute, I’m nervous. I’m waiting for the questions, the side-eyes, the surreptitious glances exchanged behind my back. Instead, Vic says hi, Austin pats me on the shoulder, and Beth hugs me. Then they ask how my weekend went, and I sink back into everything immediately: the banter, the rhythm of talking with them, all of it.

  We spend our last week of high school doing a whole lot of nothing. All around us, things are wrapping up. Beth has her last track meet. Austin quits his job at the frozen yogurt shop. We enjoy the catharsis of cleaning out our lockers, only to get nostalgic when we realize we’ll never have lockers again. We feel our backpacks get lighter and spend evenings shooting the shit down at the playground. And me, I’m right back where I belong: enjoying the end of everything together and hanging on to all the little moments exactly like I want to. It’s the group and me, ready to blow the hinges off the universe. I can just feel that this era of my life is lightning in a bottle—the kind of thing that you don’t find everywhere or anywhere except here and now.

  My last day of high school is on a Tuesday. I get up and I put on my annual Last Day of School outfit: a red T-shirt with faded jeans and mismatched socks. When the five of us meet up to drive to school that morning, Beth’s “hi hi” is in a voice that sounds like a grimace … excited, but wary. We’re all bracing ourselves. Then we walk into school without our backpacks and go to first period for the last time.

  I end up leaving lunch early to wander the main hallway. I laugh a little at the freedom of breaking the rules … what’re they going to do, write me up?

  All the things I felt in this building … the rush of walking to classes with friends for the first time. The good days; the bad days. The ordinary ones. From now on, if I ever walk this hall again, it’ll be just like I used to, instead of just like I do.

  When will I even walk through the halls again, anyway? What will it feel like?

  “I’m graduating, bitch,” I murmur under my breath.

  “What’d you call me?”

  I jump at Lily’s voice, but I turn to see she’s giving me her usual teasing smile. She reaches out and puts her hand over mine, swiveling so she’s standing shoulder to shoulder with me.

  “How’re you doing so far?” she asks, in that I-know-today-is-rough-for-you voice.

  “Not bad, not great. Everything’s dialed up to eleven.”

  “Isn’t it always for you?”

  “Fair enough. Dialed up to fifteen, then.”

  “Fifteen. Oof.” She pats my arm, pulling me next to her. And together, there we stand. Facing the empty hall.

  “This might just be a me-thing,” Lily says, “but it feels like we just started here.”

  “Definitely not just a you-thing.”

  “We’re old.”

  And we smile at the sea of lockers, remembering.

  Two hours later, the final bell rings.

  I stumble through the main lobby in shock. None of us say much in the car ride home. Austin offers us the Italian ice in his freezer, so we pull up to the park and eat it in the back of his truck while I try not to cry.

  “Saying goodbye to everyone is going to suck,” Lily says, leaning her head on my shoulder as our legs dangle off the truck bed.

  “I was just thinking that,” I say.

  “Keep in mind, it’s not like any of us are dying or anything,” Beth points out.

  I nod, because she’s right. “But we won’t be here anymore.” “Yeah,” she says, and she nods because I’m right too. The five of us sit side by side in silence.

  It feels like I can barely remember the simple days—the ones where I’d wake up excited to go to school to see everyone or run around the neighborhood. Exploring the thrills of new friends, a new voice, a new life. The early times where everything just felt correct in the world. Small and simple and pristine. Sometimes I close my eyes and try to slide into the skin of younger me—the guy who went to bed thinking about his new girlfriend with a stupid smile on his stupid face. God—first love. Beginnings. I’d take all this hurt all over again just to feel that little ache of being alive. Because everything morphs—so slowly you barely notice it—until you realize Christmases have become less about wonder and more about shopping stress. Birthdays lose their magic. You have more of those days when it’s impossible to feel like the path ahead is better than the one behind you. So you listen to all your old music from when you were younger, and you’re longing for the days when you first discovered those groups. You try to get a second helping of all that novelty, to convince yourself that it hasn’t been extinguished from your life. But it’s a smaller hit each time—like stripping out a screw. It feels like life adds more and more stipulations tacked onto simple joy until it’s not worth looking for anymore. You get to go to prom and graduate high school, but you deal with the stress of leaving your home behind. You feel it all—freedom but loneliness. Stronger joy but sharper pain.

  Maybe that’s the secret to it all—maybe when I’m eighty I’ll be full of life, full of memories, full of music, full of stress, and I’ll have spent every year prior wishing it had killed me sooner.

  But as I look at our group, sitting on that flatbed snuggled together, I know one thing for sure: Wherever I am and whoever I end up being, all I hope is that I’m not alone. I think I can be anything except alone.

  FIVE

  March 14th—Senior Year

  Journal:

  Spent almost the entire rest of my spring break alone. The silver lining was that I had the house to myself, so I didn’t have to deal with putting on an act for my parents. Mom gave me a standard we-still-love-you speech, and during dinner one night, she stage-coughed and asked Dad if he was okay with me being bi. His response, while succinct, affirmed his unyielding support in his own special way.

  “Fuck do I care? Use condoms.”

  I spent the first day recovering from the Lanham Trip: took a shower; listened to my ambiance in the Studio. By day two, though, I took the morning to pace and come up with a plan of action: I needed to talk to Lily about what happened. There were a million what-ifs spinning around in my head—what if she heard you
say ‘stop’; what if she didn’t; what if she thought you were kidding; what if she’s waiting for you to bring it up. All the conjecture was eating me alive, and task number one was to put a cap on that. I could let my mind go down a hundred horrible roads, but they’d all be hypothetical. As Dad’s said a hundred times: “Don’t worry about a problem until you’ve confirmed it’s a problem.”

  So yesterday I ripped the Band-Aid off … or, tried to: I asked Lily to go on a walk through the neighborhood. She showed up in my driveway in a gorgeous yellow sundress, same smile as always, and I did my best to act normal. The goal was to do what I’d failed to do on the bus ride home, aka, talk to her about this in a coherent way. My hand shook against hers and I almost pussied out, but I remembered the ache of fucking it up last time, and just blurted it out as we walked: “Can we talk about the other night? In the dorm?”

  “Mm. What about it?” she asked, a bewildered little smile on her face. Then her eyebrows perked up. “Oh! I forgot to text you. I got my period yesterday. So it’s like I said, nothing to worry about. But I figured that makes you feel better.”

  “It’s not about that,” I said.

  “Oh. I mean, what else is there?”

  Something about the way she said it… . It didn’t feel at all evasive, but it didn’t feel oblivious either. It was this tone of, I know what you’re talking about, but why are you bringing it up? Everything inside me squirmed around, tossing me back mentally to ninth grade when I made a faux pas every other sentence. What the fuck was I about to accuse her of?

  I felt myself getting more worked up, and when I started to hug myself, Lily said, “Whoa, okay, okay. You seem tense. How about we go see that movie you were talking about?”

  “Now?”

  “Right now, yep.” She tried to rub my back but let go when I wiggled away. “I know I said I hate comedies, but if it’ll help you feel better, I swear I won’t complain.”

  So that attempt was a bust. For the rest of the week, Lily seemed hell-bent on cheering me up. I didn’t meet up with her again, but every afternoon, she dropped off some new gift at the doorstep—a plate of homemade cookies, or a poem about how amazing I am. Her usual whole-nine-yards shit. She started re-posting more quotes on her blog about relationships: “A soulmate relationship isn’t only peaches and cream, it’s roses and thorns” and “If someone really loves you, no matter what you do, their feelings for you won’t change.”

  All of it made me feel gross, so I just stayed inside and tried to keep myself distracted.

  I tried sleeping, but I couldn’t do it more than a few hours at a time. I found myself jumping at noises. Not just the usual loud ones, but regular ones too. The doorbell, footsteps, a truck driving by … it was like my subconscious thought someone was coming to kill me.

  I tried watching porn, only to figure out my dick didn’t work. Couldn’t stay hard, even when I put on my favorite bookmarked videos. Every time I started thinking about sex, it opened the floodgates back to that night. I spent a day looking at more intense stuff, as much of it as I could find. Anything that could overwrite the movie in my head. Eventually I gave up.

  The only options left to fill my days were seeing the group—which, by extension, included Lily—or going to the neighborhood gym, alone.

  I lifted a lot of weights.

  I started facing away from the mirror when I did it—couldn’t look at myself making those dumb faces. If I had to describe the feeling, it was like when you picture a humiliating moment from when you were younger—the kind that makes you squirm and go, oh my God get out of my head, get it away, ew.

  Ew.

  I also got back into writing short scenes. It made me realize how much time I’d spent away from it to hang out with Lily. Last night, I hid out in the Studio—too antsy to sleep—and tried to write a new one.

  We open on a shot of GLITTER BOY… . Let’s take a look at him: a teenage boy in short shorts and a tank top, his hair and face matted with rainbow glitter. He’s soft. Sensitive and scared. Whiny and weak. Begging for attention, affection, wanting everything handed to him.

  Glitter Boy recoils at the idea of one hard day’s work. He depends on all his prescription drugs for his fucked-up head and then when he flies off the handle, he blames the fact that there aren’t more drugs in him or more therapists to validate his whining.

  Glitter Boy wouldn’t possibly be caught BUILDING great things, CREATING great things, HELPING great people, MAKING great changes to the world. Too lazy to get up off the mat. Too soft to ever take a joke. Too scared to ever take initiative. All he does is sit on his phone someone else paid for in the clothes someone else bought and the nail polish he put on to scream his desperation for attention, and he protests the world without ever doing anything about it, and he takes from the world without giving. That’s all he does. He takes and he complains when others don’t let him take. And if he ever sees that he’s not the center of attention in any room he walks into, he opens his whiny little mouth and cloys in his grating little voice until someone notices him.

  “LISTEN TO ME!” he whines.

  He’s not the same as a normal person—how could he be? He prides himself on finding other people just as whiny and just as entitled and just as grating.

  I want to scream it: THAT’S NOT ME! Look at my self-awareness! Can’t you see it? I see what you see and I’m not him! I’m not helpless. I’m not your bubble-wrapped, sensitive, spineless little bitch. I’m not begging for anyone’s sympathy or affection or attention. I just want you to see me as fucking human. I want you to see me as someone who does do hard work and does change things instead of complaining and doesn’t beg for attention and isn’t afraid to criticize my own people and isn’t afraid to admit there are some things you just need to get over. Someone who isn’t allergic to earning my way to where I’m at.

  I have things that make me smile and things that make me angry and I love my mom and dad and I feel anger I don’t know what to do with and pain I wish I didn’t have and I’m not who you see when you look at me and I’m not who you think of when you hear the word victim. Because how it sounds is nothing like how it feels.

  I hit my own kneecap because that makes me different. And I type and TYPE and

  I’M NOT HIM! HE WOULD WHINE AT PEOPLE INSTEAD OF HITTING HIMSELF! HE WOULD BEG FOR ATTENTION INSTEAD OF KEEPING IT QUIET! LOOK AT ME AND LISTEN TO ME! I’M NOT HIM!

  it hurts.

  LISTEN TO ME! LISTEN TO ME! LISTEN TO ME!

  SIX

  I GET HOME FROM MY FIRST DAY OF GRAD PRACTICE to find him waiting on the sofa in the living room.

  “Why don’t you have a seat,” Dad says. No greeting; no acknowledgment of his absence for the past few weeks. Just marching orders.

  I lean back against the wall next to my chair. “I’m fine here.”

  “Suit yourself.” He scratches his face—his hair is longer, and he has a little more stubble. But otherwise, it’s typical Dad. Same narrow eyes, same bags latched under them.

  The ensuing silence makes me feel like I’m supposed to speak, but I don’t have anything to say.

  “How’re you,” Dad finally says in his not-a-real-question tone. Like I’m a cashier.

  I give the floor my ugliest glare instead of answering. This pretend-I-didn’t-fuck-up act is how it always is with him—like when he hit me, or his episode after the tire blew out. Turner men don’t lay things out. Turner men put on masks and grit their teeth to grin through them.

  “You’re pissed at me,” he says. He claps his hands on his knees, making me wince. “That’s understandable. But you’re going to be pissed at me with your listening ears on, okay, because there are some things we need to hash out.” I don’t respond.

  “When this whole thing started, I did everything I could to be respectful of you and your … you know, privacy.” He stumbles over the word. I bite back a scoff, which he seems to sense. “I know you don’t think that; that’s fine. Your mother and I sometimes disagree on th
is, but it’s not my job to be your best friend … best pal, whatever.”

  I take a seat now, not looking at him. We’re both staring at our laps—a mirror image reflected across a few feet of hand-laid flooring.

  “I hope you like me; that’s what I try to aim for, but if you don’t, I still don’t care. My job description as your dad is such a long list, I couldn’t write it down. But if I did, you’d find that ‘does my son think I’m a dick or not?’ isn’t on it. So … think whatever you want of me. Fine. But, fact of the matter is, it’s my duty to protect you. Situations like these … it’s out of my control. And you know I just do wonderfully when it comes to that.”

  He gives a small chuckle to indicate he’s joking. My father jokes so rarely—at least in a real way, not his sardonic one-liners—that it’s almost a warm feeling when he does. Almost.

  He raises both hands.

  “You know what my first instinct was after the school told me what happened to you? I wanted to sit down with a pen and paper and have you walk me through the whole thing step by step. Instead, guess what? I took the afternoon—did some searching online. I found that one of the worst things you can do is have the victim re-live the attack, so I nixed that plan. I never asked you for details; I never asked who did it. I wanted to, but that took a backseat to respecting your well-being.”

  I open my mouth to say, thank you for saying that, but that feels a little too weird, so I just mutter, “Thanks.”

  And he answers, “You’re welcome,” but cuts off the end, like he feels weird too. I hate how uncomfortable this is. It’s moments like these that make me wonder why I wish my father would open up more.

  “All this to say.” He draws out the phrase. “The numbers are stacked against us. Of every thousand sexual assaults, around two to three hundred are reported. Only forty-six of those reports lead to arrest; and oh-by-the-way, only five of those forty-six gets a conviction. The mission here—and it’s an important one—is to make sure your case is among the 0.5 percent of times the system actually works.” He leans forward in his chair. “I tried to let the school do their thing; I let Sergeant Schmuckatelli go through his motions. But lo and behold, those galaxy brains confirmed that their skills extend to two areas: hemming and hawing. From the get-go, I suspected it would turn into precisely what it turned into—five pounds of shit in a three-pound bag.”