As I thought about what to say next, I imagined those scenes in cartoons where the character had the devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. Sometimes I wished I could perform brain surgery on myself and cut out the part known as the conscience. Instead, I would just numb the nerves that Friday night with the only sedatives available.
“Mick, dude, help a friend out,” Brody pushed. “Like I said, I’ll owe you.”
I knew I’d never figure out the balance sheet between Brody and me. I did stuff like this for Brody all the time, but Brody, like the thing with Rex, certainly did things for me. I opened up a blank Word document and typed in the title and Brody’s name.
“How do you know stuff?” Brody asked me.
“What do you mean?” I responded.
“Like what to write about some poem. I don’t get it,” Brody says, his voice a mix of admiration for me, confusion at the world, and frustration with himself for his limitations.
“I don’t know, I just do,” I said, but I wanted to say, I’ll tell you if you tell me how to be like you: strong and fearless. But instead I started typing my words under his name.
Brody gave me a good-natured slap on the back as he got up to leave. “Dude, I’ll save you a seat in the ’teria.” As Brody walked through the library, he looked like he owned it.
“Thanks,” I said, to myself, typing away as Brody left me behind. I don’t blame Brody for who he is. He grew up with two older brothers, both of them a lot bigger than him. I remember big tough Brody crying like a girl after one of his brothers would kick his ass. His mother was useless, and his father mostly absent. After his dad died, things got worse for a few years. But once Brody’s oldest brother, Jack, graduated from high school, he signed up for the army. Cooper graduated the next year and followed—as he did in all things—in Jack’s footsteps, but never made it out of basic training. He was serving—not overseas, but ten years in a military prison for beating up an officer.
As I stared at the blank Word document, the blazing white screen was a light illuminating my mind. Frost was wrong: it’s the roads we take, like following Brody on my bike that day, that make all the difference.
Don’t you wish your life had an undo button like Microsoft Word?
When you mess up, and you know you’ve messed up, you could just press a button, and whatever you did wrong would be undone. Then click it again and undo the thing that led you to mess up. Then again, and again, until you return yourself to an innocent baby. You know why babies are innocent? Not because they don’t do bad things, but because they don’t know bad from good so they can’t make a choice. All my life, I thought I wanted to be able to make my own decisions, never realizing choices don’t make you free; they tie you down.
Fifth Period
I stumbled into history hungry for food and desperate for sleep. Writing Brody’s paper took longer than I thought it would, so lunch wasn’t my usual pile of fries and pizza slices but a can of Coke and my last two aspirin instead. I was in no mood to hear about the problems of the Greeks or listen to the geeks in the class kiss up to Mr. Lomax. It seems to me that history is simple. I wanted to say, Some people get powerful, then they mess things up and other people take over, until they mess up. I used to like history but wanted out of the class in the worst way since my own history lesson, Nicole Snider, sat two chairs away.
I tried not to look, but I wasn’t that strong. It would’ve taken all the muscle mass in Brody’s arms to stop me from turning my head to look at her. Like most everyone in the school, she wore the red and white game-day colors. Under her bright red sweater, she had on a white blouse with a button-down collar tucked into black button-fly jeans. Whenever she’d worn these jeans before, I couldn’t help but focus on one round gold button, almost at the crotch—no man’s land thanks to the purity pledge.
Today as I sat in history class, I thought about Nicole’s future with Kyle and couldn’t help but wonder if that promise was a lie. The truth is like oxygen: it’s all around but you can’t see it. You take it on faith that it is there and you would die without it. But lies are like poison gas: you can’t see it either, but if you pay attention, you can sometimes smell it before it’s too late.
Lomax rambled on about Athens, like any of it mattered. He spoke in a monotone voice that went well with his monochrome brown outfit. I finally snapped back to attention when he asked the rare question. While my hand stayed down, half of the others’ in the room went up. It was like he had said, Okay, raise your hand if you have a future.
When Nicole answered Lomax’s question, it was overwhelming. I wasn’t thinking so much about her voice speaking, as I was about her mouth against Kyle’s ear, not mine; of her lips touching Kyle’s lips, not mine. I could feel and smell them together, and that imagined touch and smell was like throwing another log on a fire, adding another brick in a wall, or hammering another nail in the coffin. She was the last straw.
“Mr. Lomax?” I raised my hand like a drowning victim calling for help.
“Yes, Mr. Salisbury. You have a comment about Athenian government?” Lomax said.
“I need a bathroom pass,” I replied, embarrassed but unbowed. “Now.”
Mr. Lomax sighed, which, other than writing on the board in something resembling hieroglyphics, was what Lomax did best. I grabbed the pass from the desk and walked outside. The minute the door closed behind me, I bent over trying to catch my breath.
I walked toward the bathroom farthest away from the classroom to give me the most possible time out of class. I kept thinking about Nicole signing the purity pledge and wondered how many other girls at school had done the same. I know I couldn’t do it; I don’t know many guys at school who could. It’d be like promising not to take a piss in the morning.
I wanted to confess to Nicole, tell her, I know you think I’m sex crazed, but I can’t help myself. Everywhere I looked—at school, on TV, on the net, or in my own DVD player—were girls I wanted. Ex-Dad was no help: at his apartment, he couldn’t let a TV show or even an ad go by without some dirty remark about a girl on the screen. So it was no surprise when at his apartment, I found, watched, and then stole the DVD Filthy First Times #18.
He never said anything to me about it. I figured either he didn’t notice it was missing or was too embarrassed to confront me about it. I kept the stolen DVD hidden away, although I lived in fear Mom would find it, or catch me red-handed watching it one-handed. After each viewing, I promised myself I would throw it away, but then I’d give in and watch just one scene, then another, and another. Sometimes I’d go a few days, but rarely longer.
I’d hinted to Brody about it, but finally showed it to him the first day of summer vacation after ninth grade. It was just the two of us. Something about Garrett was bothering me, and our smackdown was just days away. And while Aaron had bought his way into the circle, I still didn’t trust him totally. When Brody said his mom was out, I brought over the DVD for him to see. Even before the first scene ended, we both felt embarrassed watching it together—lying on the floor, alternating between cracks and moments of silence, shock, and awe. I guess we watched so intently that we didn’t hear the door open and his mom come in. I wondered how her fire alarm-volume voice didn’t wake the dead when she saw what was on her TV screen.
“What the hell is going on here?” she shouted as she dropped bags of groceries on the floor. Brody made a futile dive for the DVD player, but it was too late. “Oh my God, I don’t believe this. I don’t believe this!”
“Shut up!” Brody shouted. I didn’t know who he was talking to, but I assumed it was me.
“What is the meaning of this?” His mom charged into the living room, unplugged the TV, and then pushed it on the floor for a glass-shattering finale. I breathed a quick silent sigh of relief that she only smashed the TV, not the DVD player, so Filthy First Timers #18 was safe.
“Mick Salisbury, I would never have guessed. When your mother hears—”
“It’s not Mick’s fault,”
Brody said. He spoke the lie like it was the pure truth. I just looked at the floor, memorizing the pattern of the well-worn brown shag carpet. “Mick had nothing to do with it. He didn’t even want to be here. It was all my idea.”
“I don’t believe you.” Brody’s mom retreated to the kitchen and reached for the phone.
“I swear on Dad’s grave, it’s true.” I sat in awe at Brody’s powers of deceit.
“You’re grounded for one month,” she said as she moved away from the phone, and her voice finally returned to its normal high volume. “One month, you understand?”
“Yes,” Brody mumbled, and he tried to hide a smile.
“No television, no phone calls, nothing,” she continued, then walked toward a broom closet in the kitchen. “And you’re going back to Mass with me every Sunday. And confession.”
“Right,” Brody said, finally catching my eye. When Brody’s mother turned around to get something out of the closet, Brody quickly ejected the DVD. He handed it back to me, and I buried it under my shirt. Brody leaned toward me and whispered, “We’re cool, right?”
Brody’s mom turned around, still angry. “And clean this mess up!”
Brody just grunted, while I hid my guilty eyes from Brody’s innocent mother.
“And you help him,” Brody’s mom said sharply to me. “And then I don’t want to see you over here for the rest of the summer, you understand me?”
I also just grunted. I knew his mom never followed through (and she didn’t this time either. I was back over a week later). She shook her head again, then left the room. I started to speak, but Brody whispered, “Shut up.” As we swept up the mess, I knew that although a lot of glass had shattered that day, our friendship was sealed forever.
I took my time returning to class. I was in no hurry to sit so close to Nicole yet be so far away from her. As I walked back through the hallways, I wished I was on the beach, walking in the sand. In the sand, you could see your footprints and always know where you’ve been and what you’ve seen. In life, you only had your memory, and it seemed to me the worse the memory, the bigger it was in your mind. I didn’t think I could have worse memories than cheating on Nicole and Dad cheating on Mom. I didn’t know as I walked back into history class that the evening would end with the worst memory of all, and footprints left in blood, not sand.
Why do guys think about sex all the time?
I thought once I had a girlfriend that things would be different. I didn’t know that while I’d promised myself I would stop, Nicole had taken a pledge of her own. It was August 6, my birthday, when we’d slipped into the back row of the movie theater and made out, just like I’d imagined. Even though our tongues tangled, Nicole kept my hands from feeling anything other than her back or brushing the hair from her eyes. I was exploding with lust and frustration. On the screen, bodies tossed in the sheets, while in the seats, the heat rose in me like water steaming on a sun-baked street. After the movie, we went outside to wait for our ride. The sun was shining brightly, and I was blinded by the contrast to the darkness of the movie theater moments earlier and the even darker words coming from Nicole’s mouth. At her church, she said, she’d taken a purity pledge not to have sex until marriage. She explained to me about her church, her faith, and this pledge, which meant not just sex itself, but most everything else beyond what we’d done just moments ago. I wanted to persuade her to break her pledge, but for all my imaginary conversations, I couldn’t find the words, so I nodded in agreement. What I couldn’t explain to her, and what I still don’t understand, is the answer to my question: why do guys think about sex all the time?
Sixth Period
I’m not a big fan of poetry. If we could study real poets like Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant, then I might actually pay attention to my English teacher, Mrs. Kirby. But to her, poetry’s about boring dead white guys yearning for urns and roads not taken, instead of stairways to heaven.
We once had a writer visit our class—some guy who thought he was a lot funnier than he really was—and he said one thing that really stuck with me. Most writing, he told us, was about asking two questions: How come? or What if? Robert Frost was caught up in the “what if,” but then, like now, I stirred the ashes and traced the path of “how come.”
Not that I didn’t ask “what if” a lot. I spent a good part of my day having “what if” conversations, thinking of things I wanted to say or should have said. And then there was my favorite “what if,” just looking around the room at every girl and wondering: what if? There’s Terri, Nicole’s best friend. She’s not gorgeous, but still too pretty for me. Terri, Shelby—there’s no girl in that English class I wouldn’t want to be with, at least once. It’s part of me that I can’t explain, this big hulking physical part of me that overwhelms everything else that I can’t find words for. I wondered how I managed to get through the day without saying anything to these girls. I wondered where my self-control came from, since ex-Dad had none, and I’d shown with Roxanne how easy it was to lose it. You could believe one thing and in a second, under the wrong circumstances and right temptations, act differently.
I was lost in my imaginary words when very real ones came from the front of the room. “Mr. Salisbury, please entertain us with your thoughts about the poem,” Mrs. Kirby bellowed. We’d handed in our papers at the start of class, so I was trying to remember what I wrote.
“What I thought?” I mumbled, stalling for time, and kicking myself under the desk. I’d forgotten this was one way Mrs. Kirby tried to catch people who didn’t read the books, stories, or poems. She would make them talk out loud, then compare what they said to what they wrote. I hoped against hope that Brody at least read what I wrote, but the look in her eyes made me think he hadn’t. Her expression told me she thought I’d done something wrong. No doubt she’d glanced at the paper Brody handed in last period and figured out he didn’t write it, which made me her number one suspect.
“We’re waiting,” Mrs. Kirby said.
“Um, it was okay, I guess,” I said, to much laughter.
“Yes, continue,” Mrs. Kirby replied, sounding bored.
“To be honest, I thought it was stupid,” I said as hands shot up amid much laughter.
She ignored the hands and instead asked me, “And what is stupid about it?”
I paused and looked around the room until I spotted Terri. Her eyes darted away like a deer hearing a gun shot, but I knew this was an open door. “Well, the guy’s saying something about making choices,” I mumbled, unsure of myself at first.
“Oh, you mean he’s not talking about roads,” Mrs. Kirby added, sounding amused. I was distracted by hands going up all around the room, but I was the one drowning, not them.
“Right, he’s talking about choices,” I said, this time a little louder. I’m smart, but I know I don’t have that “look,” the one that would make teachers think I was a good student. I often wondered if that was really what made all the difference. Not who you are, but what you look like. If I was as good looking or preppy as Kyle, no way would Nicole have dumped me. Just thinking about Kyle was like gasoline poured on a fire. I know I cheated on Nicole, but the world cheated me first, so I said, “It’s about a guy who gets cheated and feels bad.”
“Cheated?” The tone in Mrs. Kirby’s voice was one of disbelief. “Explain, please.”
“Frost seems to be saying that in life you come to forks in the road and make decisions about what to do.” I could barely get the words from my throat. “I don’t think it works that way.”
“What way?” Mrs. Kirby asked like she was actually interested.
“Well, you know, I think the majority of your decisions are mostly made for you,” I said, my confidence growing. “It’s not what choice you make, it’s who you are.”
“But doesn’t everyone have choices?” she asked. Hands shot up again, but I wouldn’t surrender.
“We don’t know anything about this guy in the poem. I don’t think everybody gets to make the same choices.
” My mind flashed back to ex-Dad in his new SUV; the Scarecrow in his straw hat. “Before you make a choice, all this stuff happens, and Frost doesn’t talk about it.”
“You said ‘cheated’—you still have to tell us what you mean,” Mrs. Kirby said.
“That’s what I’m saying.” I paused but wanted to scream in frustration because I couldn’t make people understand me. “You hear how everybody is equal, but that’s a lie. If somebody’s rich, then somebody else is poor. And if you don’t have stuff …” I paused again. I couldn’t bring myself to list the things I didn’t have that the Kyle and the Whitney World have; I couldn’t bring myself to tell everyone how inadequate I felt even in an unfair world.
“And?”
“And if you don’t have stuff, it’s like somebody cheated you out of it,” I said.
“Stuff?” She tried not to laugh at my use of such an un-poetic word while discussing poetry.
“But it’s more than that,” I said and I wondered if people actually saw the lightbulb go on over my head like in some cartoon. “Who you are determines which choices you get to make. So, while everybody has choices, the less stuff you have, the fewer choices you get. That’s what I mean by cheated.”
“Very interesting,” Mrs. Kirby said. I believe she smiled at me for the first time ever.
“Um, one more thing,” I said. Mrs. Kirby looked amused again, no doubt wondering who had taken over my body.
“Continue, please,” she said, then motioned for others to put down their raised hands.
“I think the poem’s also about regret,” I said, then turned away from the teacher to look right at Terri, so she could tell Nicole. “I think the poem is about when you make the wrong choices, feel bad, and wish you could just undo it. Wish you could make things right.”
“Very interesting, Mick, I look forward to reading your paper,” Mrs. Kirby said. I stood there for a moment before sitting down, wondering if Terri would deliver the message to Nicole. But she just looked bored and her eyes were like a vacuum pulling every single soul out of the room. Only I was left, feeling totally alone in the world. Mrs. Kirby saw me maybe for the first time as a bright and engaged student, but as I caught a glimpse of myself in Terri’s soul-sucking stare, I saw something different. I wasn’t Mick Salisbury, I wasn’t even Pool Boy or 151. In her eyes and those of Nicole, I was a pathetic, lonely, and hopeless figure; I was a scarecrow.
Cheated Page 4
