We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  “Oh!” the agent said. “I didn’t know anyone was here.”

  “Pardon me. I stayed behind to use the bathroom.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Don’t let me interrupt you,” she said as the couple appeared from the kitchen. “It’s a great house.”

  “It is,” the husband said.

  “Well, we know the toilet works!” she said, and felt instantly foolish. The agent looked as uncomfortable hearing it as Eileen felt saying it.

  “Yes—ha!” the agent said, a little belatedly.

  “Do you mind if I leave through the front door? Could you lock it after me? I’d like to get a look at the front porch.”

  “Not at all!” The agent looked relieved. “Please!”

  Outside, Eileen’s frenzy subsided. She caught her breath leaning against the railing, feeling its smooth but bumpy paint. She smelled the mown grass and the lavender scent of the lilacs in the tree, and she listened to the birds, the shuffling leaves in the branches. The manicured bushes shook mildly in the wind. No police or ambulance sirens battered her ears, nor any thunder from souped-up cars. A little girl rode by on a bicycle and offered her raised hand in a wave. Eileen waved back, completing the illusion of ownership. And then it hit her, the peace she had sought in going up there, the ineffable something she’d been chasing. Then she heard the agent and the couple enter the foyer and felt the peace slip away. Their voices were muffled through the door, but she knew they were speculating about the house, weighing it, considering it. In her mind it already belonged to her. She would do whatever she had to do.

  27

  Connell wasn’t sure why he’d told his mother he wanted to move. Maybe it was because he’d seen how much she wanted him to want to. The truth was, he didn’t want to go anywhere. It felt like leaving right now would be like quitting, like saying, I really am the pussy you think I am. And he was heading to a new school. He’d make friends there, but if he moved, he’d lose the ones he had now; he was pretty sure of that. Farshid, Hector, and Elbert had stuck with him through all the teasing he’d endured. Farshid was going to Brooklyn Tech, Hector to St. Francis Prep, Elbert to Molloy.

  When they moved, he was going to leave part of himself behind. Even the ex-friends who gave him so much trouble were part of his life. Maybe they’d all look back on it and laugh when they were adults, drinking wine around each other’s kitchen tables, throwing their heads back and remembering how they were as kids. You had to stay in the same town to get that kind of rich history with people. You had to have ties that ran pretty deep.

  He wasn’t going to have a home anymore, not in the same way. His mother didn’t seem to mind that idea. But his mother had stayed in Woodside until she was in her twenties. Her best friends were people she’d known since first grade. He saw the way they enjoyed each other’s company. She said it wasn’t like that anymore, that people moved around, that there weren’t neighborhoods anymore like there used to be, but he knew it could be like that. All you had to do was not go anywhere.

  • • •

  He was playing Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!! at Farshid’s. He tried twice to get past Piston Honda, but his heart wasn’t in it. He handed the controls to Farshid and watched him work his way through Soda Popinski and Bald Bull. Connell couldn’t even get to the place Farshid started from. Farshid’s fingers on the buttons looked like the beating of a hummingbird’s wings.

  Kids pretty much left Farshid alone. He’d come to St. Joan’s in sixth grade, by which point everybody had settled into cliques. He was kind of a free agent.

  “My mother’s going to move us,” Connell said.

  “Yeah?” Farshid sounded like he’d heard him but not heard him. He was moving the controller around in the air as he slapped furiously at the buttons.

  “She wants to get us out of here.”

  “Where to?”

  “Westchester.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “The suburbs.”

  “That’s cool.” He cursed and threw the controller, though it landed softly on the rug, and he retracted it by the cord and restarted the game.

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have my friends here,” he said.

  “You’d get a backyard. Maybe a pool.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’d do it.”

  “What about your friends?”

  “What about ’em?”

  “You wouldn’t care about leaving?”

  “No offense,” he said, “but yeah—no.”

  “I’d miss you and Hector. Even Elbert.”

  “You’re not gonna see us anyway, even if you stay. You’re gonna be in the big city with all your nerd friends. You’re gonna jerk each other off in the locker room.”

  “Maybe you have me confused with yourself,” Connell said.

  “I’m going to have girls do that for me, thank you very much.”

  “Everything’s going to change all at once.”

  Farshid finished the level and paused the game. “You just need to reinvent yourself. That’s what my mother said to me, ‘Reinvent yourself.’ In Farsi, though: ‘Khodeto az no dorostkon.’ I didn’t want to come here, man. There was some political shit with my father. We had to leave fast. Talk about everything changing.”

  “You couldn’t go to Brooklyn Tech if you moved.”

  “I don’t give a shit where I go to high school, man! Here, there, I don’t care. I care about what’s after that. College! Living on my own.” He slapped his hands together. “Beautiful girls in my dorm room! Hah!”

  Connell knew why the other kids didn’t tease Farshid. He wasn’t vulnerable to them; he already had a plan.

  “This is home,” Connell said.

  “Home?” Farshid said. “What does that even mean? I’m going to work on Wall Street. I’m going to have a hot wife like Alyssa Milano that I bang a lot in my big bed. I’m going to have a big house and a big pool. That’s home.”

  Connell felt like a child; all he cared about was getting to hold a girl’s hand someday, and Farshid was already thinking of what he would do with his wife.

  “Sounds good,” Connell said.

  “Reinvent yourself!” Farshid said, handing him the joystick. “You can start by not sucking so bad at Punch Out!!”

  “I have to invent myself before I can reinvent myself,” Connell said.

  “Aw, don’t say that,” Farshid said. “You’re already somebody. You’re the biggest nerd I ever met in my entire life.”

  28

  It started in math class. Gustavo Cruz was tapping him on the back. Connell had been resisting all year, but Gustavo hadn’t given up. It was the time of year when every point counted for some kids. Usually Connell just framed his test more tightly with his arms, leaned over it more to obscure it with his body. He didn’t care if it made him look like a hopeless nerd; he wanted the teachers to know he had nothing to do with cheating.

  Gustavo was slapping him on the neck now. Connell couldn’t turn around to tell him to stop without risking looking like a conspirator.

  He thought about what he must look like to the others—a stiff kid incapable of acting normal, a former fat kid still awkward in his body, a nerd with no style or balls who would never, ever kiss a girl. He’d been insulted and made fun of a thousand times, and he’d hung from the basketball hoop, desperate to shift his hand down to cover his privates but too afraid to fall, but he hadn’t suffered the truest humiliation, because his parents always told him he was worth more than other kids could see. He wasn’t sure he believed that anymore.

  He sat up straighter, leaned to the side, and gave Gustavo full view of his paper—the top part, at least. It was a multiple-choice test with a couple of show-your-work problems at the bottom. The multiple-choice alone was enough to get Gustavo to pass. Connell was nervous. He would have been even more nervous if Miss Montero ever even looked his way during tests, but he’d put up such staunch resistance that
it must have seemed to her as if the fight on that front had been permanently won.

  In the lunchroom Gustavo exulted.

  “Man, that was the shit. Cuh-nell!”

  “Shh . . .” Connell tried to play it cool, but he felt exposed. “Keep it quiet.”

  “I get you, man.”

  A couple of days later, when they had a surprise quiz, Connell waited until he’d finished and then leaned to the side a little. This time Miss Montero snapped, “Eyes on your own paper!” but Gustavo had probably had enough time.

  “Cuh-nell!” Gustavo said again, and Connell thought, Con-null. Con-null.

  • • •

  That afternoon, instead of hustling home, he found himself sitting on the rectory steps with them. Some cosmic sleight of hand had deposited him in their midst. He hoped none of them would notice he didn’t belong.

  They went to Shane’s apartment to make prank calls. They called Gianni’s and had a pie delivered to the address in the phone book for one of their teachers. They called Antigone Psillos, a good-hearted, untouchably homely girl who had been given the unimaginative nickname of An-pig-o-nee. Pete asked her out, and when she cautiously agreed, he said, “Psych!” and hung up the phone.

  “What’s that Chinese kid you hang out with?”

  “Who?”

  “Your friend,” Shane said. “Elbert. Elbert Lim.”

  “He’s not my friend.”

  “Whatever. What’s his number?”

  “I don’t know,” Connell said.

  “Here,” Shane said, passing him the phone. “You dial it. Order some Chinese food.”

  The guys were sniggling and slapping their knees. They were in Shane’s living room. His mother worked late, and his father wasn’t even in the country. He was a Marine who’d been in the Gulf War. He was supposed to have come back in March, when the war ended, but he’d been sent to Bangladesh to do relief work after a cyclone. There was a picture of him in his uniform on the wall right above the phone.

  “I don’t know the number,” Connell said.

  “Bullshit,” Pete said. “You talk to that kid every day.”

  “Hang on,” Shane said. “I had to call him once for homework.”

  Shane got his address book and dialed the number. He made excited faces as it rang.

  “Hello?” he said into the phone. “Is this Chow-Chow Kitchen? I want to order some fried rice and spare ribs.”

  The other guys were hooting. Connell tried to smile. Shane had his hand over the receiver. His father, he mouthed.

  “No, I said I want to order spare ribs. For delivery.”

  Shane slipped into laughter and hung up.

  “Call back!” Pete said. He handed Connell the phone. “You call.”

  Connell pretended to look at the paper and picked up the receiver. He dialed slowly, made a mistake on purpose and started again. Then he made a genuine mistake, from nerves. Shane grabbed the sheet and dialed. Connell was still holding the receiver. It rang a few times and someone picked up. It wasn’t Elbert’s father. It was Elbert himself now.

  “Hello?” the voice said.

  Connell was too nervous to speak.

  “Hello? Who is this? Can you stop calling, please?”

  Elbert hung up.

  “He slammed the phone down,” Connell said, hoping that would be enough.

  “Call back!”

  “Don’t you want to call someone else?”

  “Call back!”

  Connell took the sheet and dialed the number. The phone rang for a while. He was relieved to have been spared. Then the line clicked on. It was Elbert again.

  “You assholes need to leave us alone now. Isn’t your break over at McDonald’s? Oh wait, I forgot. Even McDonald’s wouldn’t hire you. I bet they’d hire your mama, though. By the hour. I hear she comes pretty cheap.”

  He’d always appreciated Elbert’s adult air, his razor-sharp intelligence. Now it made him feel ashamed. They were looking at him intently, his new, old friends.

  “Say something,” Shane urged.

  “I want to order spare ribs and fried rice,” Connell said in a fake voice deeper than his own.

  “That’s really funny,” Elbert said. “Original. I’ve never heard that before. Not even once.”

  Connell didn’t know what to say. He felt an idiot grin spread across his face. He could feel himself getting dumber. He saw the other faces looking back at him with—could it be?—appreciation. All he could think to do was order more food.

  “And some egg rolls,” he said in a fake Chinese accent that made his friends laugh even louder. “And wonton soup.” It made him feel sick to do it—his father would have lost his mind if he knew—but it also felt good to be one of the guys.

  “Shane Dunn? Is that you? Pete McCauley?”

  He was praying Elbert wouldn’t say his name.

  “We’re not even Chinese,” Elbert said. “Not that you idiots would know the difference. We’re Korean. I don’t even like Chinese food. Why don’t you ask for some kimchi? Maybe my mother would make some for your ignorant asses. I could come over and throw it in your face.”

  Elbert was like that: pugnacious. Usually it was awesome; now it just scared Connell. Elbert’s mother’s kimchi was delicious. The first time Connell had had it, he’d felt like his mouth was on fire; he’d never had anything so spicy at home.

  “Come on, Connell!” Pete shouted. “Say something.”

  A hush fell over the guys at this transgression of protocol. They feigned shock and started cracking up.

  “Connell? Is that you?”

  Connell hung up before he could answer. He knew Elbert wasn’t going to talk to him anymore, so when they told him to call Farshid, he just took the phone and dialed.

  “Give me that,” Shane said. “I want to talk to this sand nigger myself.”

  Standing beneath his father’s stern portrait, Shane shouted a stream of insults into the phone. He didn’t bother trying to disguise his voice.

  • • •

  When Donny went to the bathroom, Connell stood by the hall door and listened for the sound of a flush or footsteps. He grabbed handfuls of coins from the big bowl on the breakfront, filling his pockets. He had an allowance, but he took the money anyway. It made his stomach ache to do it.

  He bought food, comics, baseball cards. At a store on Roosevelt Avenue, he watched some guys buy nunchuks and throwing stars. Then he bought a curved-bladed knife that snapped with a violent click into its protective handle. He brought the knife to school and unzipped his backpack to show his new friends.

  “Put that shit away,” Shane said. “How can you be a nerd and so stupid at the same time?”

  • • •

  He didn’t have a game at Elmjack, so he went to the park. All his new friends played hockey. He didn’t have any hockey gear, so he played catch with one of the older guys for a while and then sat and waited.

  Afterward they walked up to Northern to Dance Dynamics to watch through the blinds while the girls danced. All the girls he’d ever had crushes on were in that class, and every guy there but him was dating one of them. The class took a break for a few minutes and some girls came outside. He was the only guy not in hockey gear. He tried to hold his glove behind his back. “Baseball’s gay,” he’d heard Shane say, and even though he’d seen how awful Shane was in the field whenever he played softball with the older guys, he still felt like a kid carrying that glove, while the others wore protective padding and towered over him on skates and rollerblades. The girls only glanced at him quizzically, as though waiting for one of the guys to explain why they’d let Connell follow them there.

  They headed to the Optimo store to steal. It was coming on evening; he knew he was supposed to have gone shopping for his mother before dinner. He should have left a while ago, but he wanted to preserve his legitimacy by doing everything they did.

  The plan was for each of them to take something while the rest distracted Andy the Korean guy behind th
e front counter and his mother back by the storeroom. They fanned out around the store. Connell stood up front, by the baseball card display case. It wasn’t hard for him to pretend to be interested, because he went in there a lot for comic books and cards. He kept Andy busy by asking a lot of questions, but he didn’t steal anything. He was sure he’d be congratulated anyway for helping the cause, but when they got down the block and showed each other their loot—candy, soda, a thermos—and his hands were empty, they called him a pussy.

  They went to Pete’s house a few blocks away. Pete got some liquor bottles out of his parents’ closet and passed them around. Connell wouldn’t take a sip.

  “You are such a nerd,” Pete said. “I can’t believe what a nerd you are. What is he doing hanging out with us again?”

  Pete looked to Gustavo, who shrugged his shoulders. “My man Connell is helping me out,” Gustavo said, and then he shot Connell a look that said, You have to help yourself out.

  They went back out to meet the girls after their dance class. He could imagine what it would feel like to be able to relax, to talk to them as if he had a right to. Once, in seventh grade, he’d called up Christin Taddei at Farshid’s urging and asked her out. The call had ended in humiliation. Now Christin was standing right there. She said something he didn’t understand. He felt like he could barely hear anything, the way the excited blood was coursing through his system.

  “You reek,” Christin said again.

  “What?”

  “You need to use deodorant. Or cologne. Or take a shower.”

  The other girls tittered. “I will,” he said. In his embarrassment he could feel his toes curling.

  “Damn, yo!” Shane said. “My girl just dissed you hard.”

  Shane peeled off with Christin, Pete headed home, and Connell walked down Northern with Gustavo and Kevin. They neared the Optimo store.

  “You should have taken something,” Gustavo said. “Everybody else did.”

  Dusk was coming on. The store would be closing soon. Andy had his back to the window. He was in college; Connell had seen him wearing an NYU sweatshirt. Connell bought cards from him every day practically, and comics once a month at least. Andy put together a regular bag of comics for him. Sometimes he threw him a free baseball card pack, just for being such a good customer. He liked to watch Connell open packs and find rookie cards.