Tonight We Rule the World

by Zack Smedley

  A tiny man in the back row slams together cymbals made of human faces.

  I write a third option.

  Suck It the Fuck Up, PUSSY.

  It’s barely legible. I stand up and my knees give out almost at once—I fall to the deck floor with a grunt.

  “We’ve heard from lots of great people … time for you to make your decision!”

  DING DING DING DING!

  Lily appears next to me, blushing and giggling in the same outfit as when we met. She stands on her tiptoes, kisses me on the cheek, then kicks my legs out from under me.

  The sign explodes in Technicolor above Caesar’s head: APPLAUSE!

  APPLAUSE!

  APPLAUSE!

  The ocean erupts into cheering.

  “What will you do next?!” Caesar yells again.

  PLENTY OF ABUSE TO GO AROUND, FOLKS!

  I try to pick myself up, but my shoes are glued to the floor. I try to remove them, but they’re made of my skin. I look down at my torso and realize I’m completely naked. The crowd jeers and points. White light flashes everywhere as they take pictures. I try to conceal myself, but my arms won’t move. My motionless body is covered in bright red Sharpie—Lily’s signature is scrawled all over my skin.

  (Blank page.)

  The crowd takes Caesar’s chant, clomping their shoes and clapping their hands. “What will you do next? What will you do next? What will you do next?”

  Options.

  A SPOTLIGHT erupts over the stage … a crimson beam of light.

  Help.

  WHAT WILL YOU DO NEXT? WHAT WILL YOU DO NEXT?

  I roll over so I’m lying on my side. And the chant burgeons on all sides as I clamp my hands over my ears.

  FOURTEEN

  March 26th—Senior Year

  Journal:

  I’ll admit I paced for hours trying to figure out what happened to screw things up with Xavier. First I searched online to see if any glitches were occurring with the app I was using—maybe he hadn’t meant to block me. If he did, fine, but it just didn’t make sense. Maybe he deleted his profile? But that wouldn’t explain why it was still showing up, grayed out.

  All I wanted was an explanation.

  I pored over my last message to him. I studied the wording, running scenarios in my head. What could I have said to scare him off? Maybe the thing about his real name? I tried to tell myself that if he was someone who’d block me over that, then good riddance. He was the weird one in that situation, not me. But I didn’t care who the weird one was. I just wanted our conversations back.

  I moped for two days, then took my name off my profile.

  I hate how much I understand Dad now. For years, he’s had this ugly poison inside him … frustration and fear and invincible anger at everything that moves. I swore that would never be me. But I look inside myself now and I’m starting to see that same poison, too.

  March 31st—Senior Year

  Journal:

  Hookup apps are murder on my ASD. I bought some weed from Austin to try to keep my nerves down, but even that only helped so much. I was still spending hours at a time fixating on messages I’d sent, pacing around the Studio and wondering if this would be the one that ruins things. There were so many rules about how to talk to people. All this ghosting, half-talking bullshit … the definition of vapidity. I didn’t get it, I didn’t like it, and I sure as hell couldn’t emulate it.

  But earlier this week, I think I found the trick. I call it Window Shopping. Here’s how it works: Instead of sorting by people who meet your criteria, you sort by who’s online right now. You pick one and message them. Something explicit, to get their attention. Then you get talking—you don’t swap info; you don’t swap greetings—the only thing you swap is dirty talk. Then you both get yourselves off, close out the app, and go back to your lives. No investment, no letdowns, just the chat equivalent of porn.

  It works.

  Reliability has become key to the persona I’ve put together: By day, I hang out with the friend group, putting my bullshit smile on and pretending nothing is the matter and trying not to squirm and feel slimy when Lily and I hold hands. But then, by night—or, rather, the minute I get home from school—I’m back on the apps, washing the slime off with something else. All these messages from people, mostly pictures, some pickup lines. Your run-of-the-mill creeps who get too persistent, so I tell them to go fuck themselves and block them.

  I’ve been window shopping every night this week.

  P.S. Lily finally stopped getting me Owen-feel-better gifts. I guess she figured out they weren’t working.

  April 1st—Senior Year

  Journal:

  I’ve written a new scene piece.

  It starts with

  RIGHT-BOY—teenager, mild-mannered, in a simple solid-color T-shirt and faded jeans—standing in a boxing ring, even though he isn’t dressed for the occasion. His opponent is his mirror image: an identical boy, mild-mannered, in a simple solid-color T-shirt and faded jeans. Except everything about him is flipped. His head tilts the wrong way, his zits are on the wrong side of his face, and his bracelet is on the wrong wrist. Completely identical yet completely wrong—a carbon copy. This person, we quickly realize, is the piece of garbage from the last write-up: Glitter Boy.

  Right-Boy is supposed to hit Glitter Boy, so he does. SMACK—right across the face, hard enough to bruise knuckles. And ZIP—an electric burst of firecrackers as every color of the rainbow explodes from the impact. A dozen florid fireflies. Right-Boy smirks—that looks cool. And Glitter Boy’s face is blank. That didn’t hurt, it seems to say. You can do it again if you’d like, he seems to say. So Right-Boy does it again—this time, harder. CRACK! Even more light—what beautiful colors! CRACK!

  The harder he hits, the more light explodes, and the whole time, Glitter Boy’s face remains expressionless. Even when he falls to the ground, bloody and trembling and still taking blows. Nothing gets to him; maybe he even likes it. We can do anything we want! We can make all the colors on Earth that we want. And what beautiful colors!

  See how much beautiful light this wrong boy can make!

  CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!

  BEAUTIFUL! BEAUTIFUL! BEAUTIFUL!

  FIFTEEN

  LILY DRIVES EVERYONE HOME FROM THE BEACH HOUSE the next morning. Nobody says much during the ride. When I get dropped at my house, Lily and I don’t kiss.

  I’m walking up my front steps when I see it: the Studio couch, sitting along the side of our house draped in a plastic tarp. That’s the first red flag.

  Piles of broken wood are strewn throughout the backyard.

  I recognize my desk first—it’s sawed into several sections, and the corner joints have been smashed with a hammer. Next I notice the side table Dad built me, disposed of in the same way. My chair and coffee table lay in a separate pile, pinning down the rolled-up area rug. Cardboard boxes full of my desk possessions are lined up next to the porch.

  The empty Studio gapes out at me.

  Dad’s on the ground. He’s grasping at the wall and grunting in pain—trying to get up, but his knees are too wobbly. He falls back onto the floor, where a patch has been torn up to expose old concrete.

  When he sees me, all he says is, “You were supposed to be home an hour ago.” “Where’s Mom?”

  “She drove down to D.C. for the immigration reform rally this afternoon.” He tries again and manages to stand, groaning through his teeth as he does. Then he repeats, “You were supposed to be home an hour ago.”

  My eye catches Dad’s tool caddy on the Studio floor. “Where did … why do you have a reciprocating saw?”

  “Sectioning the drywall.” Dad leans against the wall, panting. “Makes it easier to rip off.”

  He’s bluffing. Power tools—anything more than a 20-volt drill—are the enemy. That’s how it’s been since the dawn of time, with both him and I. Neither of us can handle the noise.

  I look at the pieces of my desk. Numbness.

  “You didn’t
have to get rid of the furniture,” I murmur.

  Dad gives me a what-can-you-do shrug. “Got no use for it if there’s no Studio.”

  “Okay.” I compose myself. “Listen to me.”

  “Sure.”

  “You don’t need to destroy the Studio. Why do that, right? I mean, you built it, it works well …” I start grasping at straws. “You, you can keep it! Do that, yeah. Just keep it, go ahead. Use it for something. But just please don’t … tear it up. Just, whatever you do.”

  “I didn’t build it for me, okay,” he says with another shrug. “I built it for you. I explained to you why I’m doing this. This is not about me taking things from you to give to myself, or somehow benefiting—”

  “Take the stuff! Take all of it—I don’t care!” I chew on my lip, digging my nails into my skin. “You built it, so take it—” “I built it for you,” Dad repeats.

  “Don’t destroy it, seriously!” I stare at the desk, the pristine mahogany stain. Dad’s initials carved into the back corner. “Do not get rid of anything else; we can figure something out—”

  “I don’t want to be doing this,” Dad says, crossing his arms and coming off the wall. “You remember I laid all this out, right? We went over all of this. There’s a very simple thing I’ve asked you for, which you’ve insisted on blocking at every turn. This is how it’s going to be if we go down that road. But we don’t have to. I don’t want this, you don’t want this. So come on, man.” He leans forward until he’s almost down to my height. “Just tell me who did this to you. Come on. One conversation, and all this goes away.”

  I close my eyes against a million images. Faces. Lily, Luke, Principal Graham, Dad, me.

  All this goes away.

  All this.

  Go away.

  (All this.)

  “Tell me or we’re going to gut the entire structure.”

  “You can’t use power tools,” I say, my eyes still closed.

  “Tell me.”

  “You can keep the stuff.”

  “Tell me.”

  My lip trembles under my teeth. I want this to be over. But what does that look like? Who wins? Lily is hell-bent on holding everything together, and Dad is on a mission to blow it wide open. Two paths, opposites but leading to the same destructive place. And me. Me …

  I want this to be over.

  I open my eyes, fixing them on his chest.

  I take a deep breath. “I—”

  “Yeah?” Dad’s eyes light up as he shifts his weight back and forth, a hand pressed to his mouth. “Come on, bud; hey, listen, we do this—you do this—and I’ll put all this back. Right now, I promise!” He licks his lips. “I’ll put everything back exactly how it was, and we even … you can even pick out new furniture, if you want. Why don’t we do that? You just tell me this, we do this one thing, and everything will go away, okay. I’ll fix up the Studio like new—better than new!—and keep it that way so you can visit whenever you want when you get back. You just need to tell me this. So come on, man.”

  I stand in silence, reaching for words that aren’t there.

  “Do you need time? Take your time. Come on. Or, or … how about this? How about I go get a paper and pen, and you can just write it down. No need to say a word about it at all. Should I do that? I can go get it right now, you can just write down who it was, and that’ll be it. All over.” When I stand there unmoving, unresponsive, Dad’s eyes dim. The panic in his voice climbs. “Or how about this? Would you be more comfortable telling someone else? You could tell your mother, or a friend, and they could just let me know. Or, hell … cut me out of the process altogether. You could tell the police directly! I’d never need to know who it was. However you want to do this, get it reported; this is your show.”

  Dad is sputtering and shaking and we both stand there in the Studio, the exposed concrete between us, our arms tight to our chests.

  I close my mouth,

  Open it,

  And close it.

  And shut my eyes.

  And shake my head.

  SIXTEEN

  THE CLASSICAL MUSIC IS GONE. INSTEAD DAD BLARES death metal at the speaker’s maximum volume. Shredding both our ears. He has earplugs in his tool kit, but he doesn’t let either of us use them. He makes me jam a crowbar into the baseboard trim, holding it in place while he hammers—CLANG, CLANG, CLANG.

  (Steve Turner, the Destroyer.)

  With every earsplitting hit, he and I both grunt, wince, jolt. Still we don’t stop. His huge shoulders scrunch, agony written all over his face as he fights the urge to reduce the noise. I yell at him to turn the music off. He yells at me to tell him who did this.

  We rip the trim off, cracking it down the middle and tossing it into the grass. Next we resume pulling up the linoleum floor, jamming our tools under the groove and twisting to pop it off. Dad’s knees start to give out again. When he tries to get up, he yelps in pain and stumbles into the wall, hugging it for support.

  “Dad—seriously!” Jesus Christ, he’s going to kill himself.

  “Tell me,” he spits.

  “Stop, just fucking stop!”

  “Tell me who!” He’s doubled over, the death metal hammering him, his hands on his head. Cowering from invisible torturers.

  “Who was it, Owen? Tell me.”

  “NO!”

  He says, “Motherfucker,” at the same time as I yell, “Motherfucker!”

  Just stop.

  Tell me.

  No. Stop.

  (Just tell me.)

  No. Stop.

  And then:

  “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?”

  My mother’s voice has never made me jump like that before. The crowbar jumps out of my hands, and I wheel around to see her standing on the other side of the yard. She’s dressed in a T-shirt that reads No Human Is Illegal, and her eyes are huge and horrified.

  “STEVE!” She screams it at the top of her lungs as she marches toward us, stopping to press pause on the music. My ears ring and burn against the new empty air.

  Dad sits back on his knees and resumes hammering at the piece of drywall in front of him.

  Mom ignites.

  “What the hell is wrong with you? HE’S A CHILD, STEVE! This is your son! Look at you—look at what you’re doing! Steve, you stop right now and look at me. Steve. STOP!”

  The hammer hits, hits, hits.

  Mom grabs me by the wrist and pulls me back, holding me away like I’m a toddler and Dad is a dangerous stranger. I struggle against her grip. “Mom—”

  “Owen, go inside. Inside, now!”

  The hammer hits, hits, hits.

  My hands clamp over my ears. I feel like I’m seven again; the drywall is flying in powdered pieces, my father is yelling, the hammer hits hits hits; I’m scared and trying to figure out what to do and my mother, who’s never cursed in front of me before, is screaming, “You put that fucking hammer down; Steve, you look at me right fucking now!”

  The drywall, flying in powdered pieces—

  The hammer hits, hits, hits—

  And my father bellows at the wall, “Tell me who it was!” “Owen, I said go inside!”

  “Mom!” I don’t know why I yell for her—she’s right next to me. I start to ask her if I should call the police, and her head whips back and forth urgently as she says, “No no, don’t call the police! Steve, you listen to me. If you keep going, you’re not coming back in the house.”

  The hammer freezes.

  Holds.

  “I mean it,” Mom says. Her eyes are brimming; her face, twisted in fiery adamance. My calm-in-a-crisis mother is, at long last, no longer calm.

  Dad looks up and puts a rattling hand over his rattling mouth.

  And says, “I’ll stop when Owen says who did it.”

  Mom’s grip on me tightens. I don’t answer.

  Dad stares at us, expressionless. Then he stands, limps to the other side of the Studio, and brings the reciprocating saw over.

  “Steve, I
swear to Christ.” Mom takes a step back. “I will call someone to come change the locks. I will put a suitcase full of your shit on the front lawn. You turn that on, and you’re out. I mean it. Stop. Ste—”

  She’s still saying his name when the saw roars to life.

  SEVENTEEN

  April 2nd—Senior Year

  Journal:

  I was in the middle of window shopping on the apps today when I got an email from Dad.

  Owen—it looks like rain tonight. Good chance to practice wet driving in the school parking lot. Be ready to go by 1900.

  We’d practiced at the school a few times before, but this was the first time doing so in the rain.

  “Just remember: steady movements, easy on the gas,” he said. “We’re going to go to the second-to-last parking space on the right, loop around past that bush, and come to a full stop.”

  As always, I loved how clear his directions were—he never got nervous; he always knew exactly what to tell me. I felt safe with him as a guide.

  He had me try pulling around to the back lot, and I was just easing into it when he said, “Hold on. You see that on the ground?”

  I squinted at where he was pointing, about fifteen feet ahead.

  “It looks like a boot,” I said. “I can go—”

  “WHOA, stopstopSTOP!”

  I squeaked and slammed on the brakes. Dad wrenched the wheel out of my grip. The brakes jackhammered under my shoes as the anti-locks kicked in, and we slid to the side.

  “Hazards on!” Dad barked.

  “Wh—”

  “Do it now.” When I fumbled with it, he leaned and punched the hazards button with his fingertip. Then he got out of the car—T-shirt and ratty jeans and all—into the downpour. I was fumbling with what to do when I saw him waving at me to join him. I shut off the car and got out into the rain, yelping at how thick it was. Dad hollered at me through cupped hands, “THERE’S A BLANKET IN THE TRUNK!”