Homo Superiors

by L. A. Fields

  “I’d get to pick?” Ray asked. Because every choice concerning him up until that moment had been inflicted upon him by everyone else.

  “Yes,” Tracy said, speaking up again as his parents returned to their own lives. “But you have to graduate first. It’s incentive, you don’t have anything yet.”

  So Ray buckled down. He practiced and re-practiced the SATs, he got all the signatures necessary for the special dispensation needed to graduate so unnecessarily early. He enrolled at the University of Chicago pending his successful graduation. He endured the loneliest semester of his life. He did most of his living in his head.

  Picture yourself in Paris, he’d think before falling asleep. Wine, art, architecture, cheese, poetry, can you see it? The joy of correcting everyone else’s pronunciation of French words for the rest of forever?

  Picture yourself in Dublin, dude, he’d think the next night. Rolling emerald hills, redheads, Guinness, literature . . . maybe you’d use lose your virginity to a girl with freckles on every inch of her skin?

  Picture yourself in London, picture yourself in Berlin, in Madrid, in Athens. Picture yourself gone from Chicago, somewhere in the sun.

  He decided at long last on Italy, Venice or Rome or Naples, he didn’t care. He’d pictured himself learning how to punt, or visiting the Coliseum, or walking hands-in-pockets through some piazza. He decided: As long as I come home with an unstoppable tan, I’ll have no regrets. As long as he came home with stories of la dolce vita, la bella vita . . . the good life.

  At last the calendar turned over to May. The paperwork was filed and his summer was wide open and free. He went to his mother with some prepared research: the best priced plane ticket for flying the nest at last, a few somewhat shabby but still safe hotels, pictures of all the places he would visit, information on how the tram lines operated, everything he could think of. All he needed to get the whole thing going was some money, one of the family’s credit cards. He expected Mom to smile wistfully, touch his face, and hand it over.

  “Oh, Ray,” she said with a sigh as she ranged her eyes over all the print-outs on the same dining room table where Ray had sat studying for six solid years. “Look, you need to know, we never really thought you’d actually graduate so fast. You can be so lazy with your homework sometimes, Tracy said a goal might help motivate you, but really honey, you’re only fourteen. Dad and I aren’t going to let you go to another country, alone, for three whole months. Just because you managed to get through school so fast doesn’t mean you’re mature enough for that sort of freedom.”

  For a moment Ray didn’t even process what she was saying. He was staring at his itinerary, and thinking, Was I reading while she was talking and got the words mixed together? But he replayed it in his head, and cocked his skull to see her looking down at the table sort of exasperated, wearing the same look she had when one of her jokes fell flat with her sons, like she thought they were old enough to get it by now, but boy was she ever wrong in expecting so much.

  The burning feeling of being wronged erupted in his core and flooded through him, prickling the hair on top of his head and making his toes curl up in his shoes. It was the same intensity of every tantrum of his youth, but goddammit he wasn’t a kid anymore! This really wasn’t fair. He was promised something and the deal had just been reneged on. How long was it going to take to get some respect around here?

  Ray felt his hands clench into fists, realized that he longed to bash his mother right in the face, and turned away before the urge overwhelmed him. He was heading fast for the front door to try and sprint the rage out of him before it became a destructive force; he would start breaking things soon, he could feel it, like a barometer plummeting before a violent storm.

  “Can you please clear the table before you go off in a huff?” his mother called after him. “Other people live here and might like to use it, you know.”

  “Oh sure,” Ray said through clenched teeth, returning quickly, feeling heady as his blood pressure dampened his hearing, making him both clear-headed and dizzy. “Let me get that.”

  He set his hand flat on the nearest page and swept as many as he could off the table and up towards his mother’s irritated expression, then took off running away from her. He couldn’t hit her, but she wasn’t above slapping him.

  “See?” she shouted after him. “This is exactly why you can’t go! You’re such a brat about everything.”

  Ray ran around the block a few times, no warming up and no stopping, and he let his muscles ignite as he fought the muggy spring air for enough oxygen to keep going as long as he was still angry.

  He couldn’t last it out. He went home angry, and woke up the next day angry, and stayed angry for weeks until he finally resigned himself to reality.

  He adjusted his sights, set them on college, on spending the next year applying to ones out-of-state so he wouldn’t be trapped in his parents’ house any longer. The place felt like a prison to him.

  But: There are many confines, wards, and dungeons in the world, he reminded himself, and you’re going to find a better one.

  1

  NOAH WAS QUICK TO LOSE Friends and alienate others once he started attending college at the University of Chicago. He took the CTA to campus twice a week for classes, an eight-minute ride that he could have walked in about twenty minutes, but there were a million reasons not to do that: he’d show up sweaty, he’d ruin his nice shoes, he’d advertise that he lived at home with his parents, etc. He looked older than fourteen, but he’d always been small for his age, so it wasn’t uncommon for people to figure out what it was that made him so odd. He was a kid to them, a child, a baby, and never mind that he set the grading curve for nearly every exam. No one talked to him for the first few weeks of classes, not until after the first test grades had been posted.

  “Hey, why don’t you join our study group, kid?” asked a tall black guy Noah later learned was named Omar. “You’re always answering in class, you’re smart. You hook us up, we’ll hook you up, get you into parties, what do you say?” He was clearly speaking on behalf of his friends, a blond kid with a sharp nose and uneven eyes, and a carroty redheaded boy with burnt-looking freckles all over his face. Noah later discovered that these were Omar’s roommates, Caleb and Ethan, but right away Noah could tell that Omar was the only one getting anyone into parties. Caleb had that drab, lopsided face and a pathetically old phone (so no looks and no money) and Ethan had the dumpling body of a young man that even wealth couldn’t help, at least not in college. Omar had the unteachable ability to talk to anyone, including his dull roommates, and the classroom wunderkind.

  Noah agreed to join their study group; he was so desperate to tell his mother that he was fitting in at college, literally any group would do. He didn’t care if Omar was just bullshitting him, didn’t care if he never saw the inside of a party, so long as they tolerated the title of Friends.

  It was during their Legal Reasoning study sessions in the library that Noah first learned about Ray Klein.

  “You know there’s another really young guy who started this year too, do you know him?” Omar asked quietly during a snack machine break, six weeks into the semester. The softly crinkling wrappers made more noise than their conversation, but still they received glares from harried graduate students nearby.

  “Oh, yeah,” Noah said. “We’re part of an invading horde, so we’ve obviously met at the tactical meetings.”

  The other guys laughed, but Omar only rolled his eyes and said, “Very funny.”

  “I think I spotted him earlier,” Caleb said, stretching his neck to look around, bringing to Noah’s mind the giraffe at the Lincoln Park Zoo.

  “Look, there he is over there,” Ethan said, pointing extravagantly enough to make this other boy look up from his study carrel and frown.

  “I think he saw you,” Omar said, knocking Ethan’s arm out of the air with a light swat.

  “I think you’re right about that,” Noah said. “Brilliant call.”

/>   Omar cocked his head to glare at Noah, which was the first moment Noah realized he was in the process of making an enemy. He admonished himself to lay off of Omar for the rest of the night, maybe even stop all casual conversation for that evening, and just stick to the homework.

  “Ugh, he’s a pretty boy,” Caleb said, finally settling back into his box of a library chair and picking his pen back up. “You better hope he’s got a shitty personality,” he intimated to Noah. “’Cause, like, in the unlikely event that some girl can bring herself to molest one of you juveniles, it’s going to be him and not you.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Ethan confirmed, coming back from rubbernecking. “He looks like a lady killer.” And he did, even Noah could see that. He looked like he wore his clothes better than the mannequins that were first sewn into them.

  “Yeah, like what’s it called, like a chickenhawk or something,” Omar said.

  The group chuckle-mumbled over the word ‘chickenhawk’ for a few seconds, and Noah found himself faced with a profound dilemma: he’d just told himself not to antagonize Omar again that night, but he could never resist correcting people when they were wrong and he knew he was right. He’d even done it to his own dear mother on occasion; he couldn’t not do it.

  “He’s not a chickenhawk, that’s not what that word means,” Noah released from his mouth.

  “Fuck you,” Omar said, “how would you know?”

  “A chickenhawk is the one who preys on the young chickens, not the young one who gets preyed upon,” Noah explained. “And it’s mostly a gay term anyway: chickens are the young boys, and the hawks are the men.” He came across the phrase while searching about hawks years ago, and the term stuck in his head.

  “You’re a mostly gay term,” Ethan said, and quietly fist-bumped Caleb over grabbing that low-hanging fruit.

  “But chickens would be women,” Omar argued. “Otherwise why do we call them chicks? Chickens are women.”

  “They’re really not,” Noah said. “Look it up any time you like. Chicks are women, yeah, and hens are women, but chickens are boys, okay? And roosters, cocks, and chickenhawks? Those are all men. I know I’m right.”

  Omar’s jaw clenched, and Noah realized that this was the end of the study group, though Caleb and Ethan did not. One of them started chanting roosters, cocks, and chickenhawks, and the other one joined in, and a library monitor came over and whispered that it was time for them to leave, that they were becoming disruptive.

  Outside of the library—where the guys usually chatted for a bit, and frogged each other’s arms, and waved goodbye to Noah, and promised to all meet again next week—this time Omar looked up chickenhawks on his phone, and in bitterness and defeat, he lit a cigarette too close to the doors.

  He said to Noah, “You know too much about gay stuff.”

  And Caleb and Ethan winced to one another and looked at Noah like they were glad Omar said that to him and not them.

  And Noah sighed deeply and said, “Well, good luck on the test, guys,” before turning away.

  All the way home he consoled himself with one thought: You might have failed at making friends, but you’re going to destroy them all on the test. It went a long way in comforting him.

  2

  RAY MADE MORE FRIENDS AT THE University of Chicago, but he actually had it just as hard as Noah did at first, before he learned to read all the new patterns around him. He was also too young, younger than Noah even, the youngest student on campus. That title caused plenty of other students to feel either threatened by or dismissive of him. On top of that: he was too attractive, a problem Noah (with his bulging gaze and slumped shoulders and heavily connected brows) did not have. Ray had a naturally flattering part in his hair, distinct jaw and cheek bones, and an even, white smile. The other fellows especially seemed to think he should be smart or good-looking, but certainly not both. Whenever he answered honestly about how he’d come by college so early, he was met with an aura of disgust or offense, like it was morally suspicious to go through school that quickly.

  So Ray stopped being honest again right away. It was foolish to have ever reverted to truth in the first place, but those early hectic days of class, the situation with his mother left unresolved and simmering so that his home life was uncomfortable too, and having to answer honestly on all his paperwork (just for simplicity’s sake) . . . the old bad habit of truth-telling had come back to him. It was important to train it away once more. He struck gold in his second week as a university man when he heard himself say:

  “How do you think I got to college so young? Obviously I slept my way to the top.”

  He used the line over and over, trying to escape the first pigeonhole everyone placed him in. Sometimes a guy would twist it into a gay joke, but Ray would only double down and pretend to flirt with the comedian if the guy was just being smart, or say, “It’s okay to be jealous,” if the comment had more self-defense about it. Sometimes a girl would frown about that being a sexist joke, and Ray would stop short, mimic her frown, and say, “Oh, yeah, I guess it is,” and then keep his brow tense until she went away like her observation might be eating him alive with its implications.

  Ray found he could diffuse or ignite any situation he was in. Secretly he was Prometheus, with the knowledge of fire, but to everyone else Ray made himself a perfect martyr to each arrow flung at him. Every joke at his expense he met with a face of ironic joy, every rebuke was taken in with as humble a stance as possible. Was he not here to laugh, was he not here to learn? And eventually everyone seemed to like him, or at least not particularly dislike him. Everybody, except for one.

  Ray was aware of Noah before Noah was aware of him, several of his many new friends mentioned hearing about some young kid who was correcting professors and basically being a little smartass in some of the classes, and they would say, “At first I thought they were talking about you, but since when do you quote Nietzsche?” Ray did not, and no one had ever accused him of such a thing before. He made it his business to find out about this other genius kid. He wasn’t worried about protecting his reputation so much as he was terribly curious. Could there really be another person even remotely comparable to himself? He didn’t like to think so.

  He had staked out Noah’s study sessions for three weeks in a row before Noah finally noticed him; he wasn’t in the library by accident. Ray did his studying at home when he did it at all, with Tracy still tutoring him, but at severely reduced hours, and getting more and more fed up with his laziness—she disapproved of his parents reneging on the promise of travel abroad (a trip that she would have accompanied him on, she wrongly assumed), but she was much more affronted by Ray’s plummeting efforts to educate himself.

  “I thought you had your own ambition, but I was wrong wasn’t I?” she’d asked him a few weeks into the school year. Ray, who had been combing his hair with his fingernails in the reflection of his mother’s china cabinet and thinking fondly of Narcissus, glanced sidewise at her and simply shrugged.

  He kept a section of notebook about Noah, with everything he was able to discern from afar:

  doesn’t really need those glasses, uses like prop

  does he ever wash his hair? looks so greasy

  lives off campus, still at home? then why so greasy?!

  I wouldn’t roll my eyes if they were that big, only draws attention

  wears the same thing every day like a cartoon character

  books all labeled Kaplan, N.—school email search reveals: Noah F.

  Jewish—bar mitzvah announcement online—really didn’t need that in

  common with him too

  studying law, definitely smarmy enough

  aha! he doesn’t like me either—good

  Ray was displeased when his cover was blown by Noah’s table mates, but he had reached the limits of long distance observation anyway. The next step, if he chose to take it, would be investigation pertinent to possible contact.

  Ray befriended Omar to find out what class he had
with Noah, and from there Ray learned Noah’s other classes because Noah stacked them all on the same two days a week, obviously to minimize his time spent on campus; he never came early, never lingered afterwards, and was never seen on the weekends. Not a coffee stop, not a snack at the vending machines, not even solo time in the library. He brought his own food, he reserved his books in advance for pick-up, he was the dullest person Ray had ever seen.

  Ray would have had to stalk him to his bus stop to meet him ‘naturally’ or else literally run into him on ‘accident,’ and he hadn’t seen anything interesting enough for that kind of effort, so he didn’t expend it. His curiosity quenched (verdict: terminal nerd, not in the least like himself), he dropped Noah as a hobby and didn’t think of him unless someone else mentioned him first, or gave another report of the kid’s incredibly antisocial behavior.

  Ray would say to them, “Oh, you’ve met my Mr. Hyde! I always seem to just miss him.” The people would laugh, and Ray would forget Noah again. By winter break, Ray forgot the kid’s real name, and no one else in his circle ever bothered to know it in the first place.

  3

  NOAH BELIEVED THAT HIS FIRST college party would also be his last. He knew what it would be without ever going: too loud, too juvenile even for him, probably cloyingly overcrowded, and he was right. A mulchy backyard, a lot of people not half as attractive as the college kids in movies, all burping and playing meaningless music, meaningless games . . . beer pong, truth or dare, courtship.

  Noah found himself there because even his mother had started insisting he try some fun, saying, “You can’t hate something you’ve never tried,” same as she used to say to him about eating his vegetables. He wanted to trip her up, say something like, “What about anal sex? What about murder? Should I give those a shot too just to make sure I don’t like them?” But he didn’t smart back to his mother. First of all, she might smart right back at him (“How do you think your father and I met?”), and second of all she was right—it wasn’t scientific of him to do no firsthand research before forming a theory.