American Youth

by Phil LaMarche

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Teddy.”

  “That’s retarded,” he told her.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Hey.” She tugged at the hem of his shirt again.

  Still he didn’t respond.

  “You know what,” she said. “You can fuck off.”

  He looked away from her.

  “Fuck you,” she said, and walked down the hall.

  He didn’t try to stop her.

  He knew he wasn’t handling it right. He couldn’t understand it. Sex, intercourse—he had ached for it. At times he’d felt as though some vital inner organ would rupture if he remained without it any longer. But now he felt something else, and he didn’t know exactly what or why. He thought he must be an idiot, maybe even gay, for here was Colleen—cute and nice and affectionate Colleen—and he couldn’t even kiss her without wincing.

  The kid and the couch and the broken swing—he wanted to forget it, and that was all the easier when she wasn’t around.

  When he walked into school the next day, the first Youth member he saw had a vicious sneer upon his face. A moment later, farther down the hall, two more members confronted him.

  “You’re so dead,” Birch told him.

  “After school, motherfucker, wicked dead,” said a kid whose name he always forgot.

  He and Peckerhead Jackson were lab partners in biology, and for the first half of the period Peckerhead managed to remain silent, but he was a talker and it was killing him.

  Without looking up from his lab report, Peckerhead finally whispered, “What the heck, Ted?”

  “What?” the boy said.

  Peckerhead didn’t reply.

  “What, Peckerhead?”

  When he finally said what was going around, the boy felt gut-shot. Point blank. The word passing through him, the concussion sending waves out from its place of impact somewhere in his torso. Rape. He felt himself sway. He wished his body would collapse. He wished he would fall and hit his head on something, lose consciousness, and wake up at home or in the hospital, anywhere other than third-period biology.

  Peckerhead told him that Colleen had confessed the details of her night with the boy to Becky Stanton, another Youth member’s girlfriend. Becky relayed the story to her own boyfriend and by the time it all got back to George Haney, it went like this: Ted LeClare got drunk and raped Colleen Crenshaw.

  “She said she told you no,” Peckerhead said.

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Did she say it?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” the boy said.

  “Did she say no, Ted?”

  “I need to talk to them.”

  “They won’t believe you,” Peckerhead said.

  “Because they want to kick my ass.”

  “No,” Peckerhead said. “Because they want you back. If they can’t have that, then they’ll kick your ass.”

  “No way,” the boy said.

  Peckerhead shrugged. “Go up to George after school and tell him how sorry you are and see,” he said. “You’re his golden boy.”

  “Jesus,” said the boy. “Why did you get me involved with them?”

  “Because if I didn’t, they could do this to me,” Peckerhead said.

  The boy shook his head.

  He didn’t follow his regular path to his next class. He walked straight to where he thought he’d find the only person who might help him—his childhood friend, and known bruiser, Terry Duvall. Terry wasn’t in the bathroom in the vocational wing, where he was known to smoke between classes, but on his way back, the boy found him sitting on a railing outside the building. The boy explained his predicament.

  “Fucking slut,” Terry said.

  “What should I do?”

  “They’re pussies and shit-talkers,” Terry told him. “You can get on my bus after school if you want.”

  “Thanks,” the boy said.

  “What were you doing with those cocksuckers anyway?” Terry said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You find me,” Terry told him. “I ain’t going to go looking for you.”

  The boy nodded.

  He skulked from class to class, staying away from his standard route. Whenever he saw a Youth member, he did what he could to avoid him, even if that required stopping and walking in the opposite direction. He was late to his last two classes because of the tangents he took.

  While the last bell meant an end to this miserable day, the boy also knew it marked an open season on himself. Once off school property, he was fair game. He searched the herd of students making their way to the buses. When he saw Terry’s orange hair, he struggled through the crowd to get to him.

  Chris Awdry walked with Terry. While Terry had come to be a known bruiser, Chris was a known psycho. He was not right. The boy knew this. It was not an act with Chris Awdry. Chris scared the boy. This was the kid whose left nipple had been disfigured by a knife his sister threw at him when he was eleven. This was the kid who had set a bonfire in his own attic.

  They made their way to the bus without trouble and took the seats at the back. The boy felt relieved when the door squealed closed and the bus groaned forward.

  A couple of miles from school Terry said, “There they are.”

  On the road behind them was Jason Becker’s Volkswagen Rabbit. At first the Rabbit was two cars back, but soon it rode close to the bumper of the bus. The car was packed full with Youth. They made every kind of violent and vulgar gesture known in the vocabulary of hands.

  “Should we tell the driver?” the boy asked.

  Chris didn’t acknowledge the comment.

  Terry just looked at him and smiled. “That’s how they would do it,” he said. “Ain’t it?”

  While the boy sat shifting uneasily in the green vinyl seat, Terry and Chris prepared themselves. Terry tied tight the work boots he normally wore loose and open. Chris took off his jean jacket and stuffed it in the boy’s backpack. Then he jumped into a crouch between the last two seats and threw two middle fingers at the car behind them.

  “Get in your seat!” the bus driver shouted from the front. Chris lingered a moment before heeding the command.

  “There’s a lot of them,” the boy said.

  “There’s three of us,” Terry said.

  Chris looked at the boy and said, “Get a rock or a stick if you can.”

  Terry leaned over and looked out the back again, “When they ratted out Devo for dealing, some of that weed he had was mine.”

  When they got off the bus, Jason Becker stood with one foot out of his car, one hand on the roof and the other on top of the open door.

  “This has nothing to do with you, Terry,” he said.

  The boy realized that it was true—this had nothing to do with Terry or Chris, and yet here they were, more inclined to go through with this fight than the boy was himself.

  “Fuck you, peckerwood,” Chris shouted.

  “What do you know about it?” Terry said.

  Becker’s car was holding up traffic. He tried to wave the cars by, but they wouldn’t pull around on the blind corner. When the car behind him began honking, Becker finally got in and pulled away in search of a more suitable pull-off or turnaround. As they passed, the Youth in the car were screaming through the windows, holding up middle fingers and fists. Terry and Chris stood their ground. The boy remembered how those same hands had shaken his own and patted his back. He had seen those screaming, bitter faces smile, warm with affection.

  “Come on,” Terry said to the boy, once the car had passed around a corner, out of sight. When the boy hesitated, Terry said, “Hurry up dumb-ass or they’ll see us.” Chris and Terry crossed the ditch on the far side of the road.

  They picked their way through the woods, eventually coming out in Chris’s backyard. There was an empty above-ground pool and a deck that ran between the pool and a sliding glass door on the house. Chris took a key from his pocket and
unlocked the back door. He flipped open a pizza box that sat on the kitchen table and took a slice. He motioned for Terry and the boy to do likewise. They took the last three pieces—they were dry and curled at the edges, the cheese white and the crust difficult to chew.

  Back out on the porch they smoked some pot from a small metal pipe. The smoke scorched the boy’s lungs. Terry and Chris laughed as he coughed and hacked. Chris rapped the ash out of the pipe. “You guys hungry?” he said.

  Terry and the boy shrugged.

  “I’m starving,” Chris said. “Got any money?”

  He collected several dollars each from Terry and the boy. He pulled another couple of singles from his pocket. He walked inside to the foot of the stairs. “Hey, you want dinner?” he shouted.

  “Here,” a voice hollered down. Chris ran upstairs and returned with a ten-dollar bill. A moment later he was on the phone ordering two large cheese pizzas.

  The boy felt safe at Chris’s house. He doubted that any of the Youth knew where Chris lived and he doubted even more that they would make any attempt to get at him there. Chris’s fight with a senior the previous year was a part of the school’s collective memory. There had only been about two dozen people present at the bout, but anyone could tell you what had happened. They said that Chris was half the senior’s size. They said the senior asked for it, taunting Chris that way. They said that when it was over, the senior was not only missing his shirt but a front tooth and a good fistful of hair as well.

  The three boys watched a movie on a pay station. The boy’s body felt heavy and his mind slow, so slow. He felt like he was melting into the couch. He found himself stopping to remind himself exactly what was happening: This is a movie, this is Chris’s house, it is after school. He dreaded the thought of ever having to leave—having to go home to his mother, stoned—having to leave the safety of Chris and Terry.

  The boy jumped at the sound of the doorbell. Terry pointed at him and laughed. Chris got up and went to the door. When he returned, he put the two pizza boxes on the coffee table in front of them. He yelled at the ceiling, “Dinner! Hey!”

  The boy leaned forward and took a paper plate and a slice of pizza. Behind him he heard someone descending the stairs. She had pajama bottoms on and a large T-shirt that hung nearly to her knees.

  “You know Ted?” Chris said to her. She didn’t look at the boy but she shook her head. “My sister, Shelly,” Chris said to the boy.

  “Hi,” the boy said.

  Shelly didn’t respond. She took two slices of pizza and went back upstairs.

  “She’s just like that,” Terry told the boy.

  The boy had noticed that her nipples had protruded through her T-shirt. And the thought of her nipples led to thoughts of sex, which led the boy to thoughts of Colleen and the whole mess he was in. He did his best to think of something else. The pizza helped.

  He waited until well after dark to leave and cautiously walked the side of the road, ducking into the woods when headlights appeared. The pot hadn’t relaxed him. He heard cars approaching that were not cars approaching but wind in the woods. When he ducked off the road, he went much farther than was necessary. He found himself walking deeper still into the forest, even after the car had come and gone. He had to remind himself: I’m walking home; home is that way.

  He walked in the front door and kicked off his shoes. The house was warm and smelled of food. He heard the television.

  “You with the boys?” his mother asked.

  He hung up his jacket and dropped his backpack at the foot of the stairs. “Nah,” he said.

  “No?”

  “Remember Terry?” he said.

  “Duvall?” she said. “Of course. Is he friends with the boys now?”

  “No,” he said. He walked into the living room. He did his very best impersonation of a sober boy.

  She had her legs pulled up on the couch and an afghan draped over them. A dirty plate and fork sat on the coffee table in front of her. The television was on. He smiled quickly at her and passed through to the kitchen. A casserole dish of chicken breasts cooked in cream-of-mushroom soup rested on the stove. A pot of rice pilaf sat next to it. He took a plate and a chicken breast, a scoop of rice. He ladled the sauce from the casserole dish over both.

  “You okay?” she asked him.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “You sure?”

  He shrugged.

  “Something with the boys?”

  He shrugged again.

  The mother stayed silent.

  “They don’t like me anymore.”

  “No?”

  “Nope.” He was eager for the chicken and rice, despite the three slices of pizza at Chris’s house.

  “Was it Colleen?” the mother asked.

  He shrugged.

  “You know, I thought she was trouble,” the mother said. “I should’ve done something.”

  He nodded. He ate quickly and rinsed the plate before putting it in the dishwasher.

  “I’m going upstairs,” he told her. “Do some homework.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  In his room he fell into a panic. He had seen the commercials, “No means no.” And Colleen had said no. But it hadn’t been like that. Or had it? By law he was guilty, wasn’t he? Yes, but it hadn’t been like that. It hadn’t been. They’d had sex after that. After that she’d said yes. How did she explain that to George? How did they explain that?

  The lethargy he’d experienced earlier had transformed into a terrible paranoia. He wasn’t getting anywhere and he wished for some way to extract the marijuana chemistry from his mind, some antidote to slow down the ideas and quell the whirlwind in his head. For several hours he sat on his bed with his history book open, and in that time he never finished reading the section he’d started on. Finally there was a knock on his door.

  “You still awake?” his mother asked.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  She let herself in.

  “I’m reading,” he said.

  “Any good?” She looked at the book splayed before him.

  He shrugged.

  “Sure that’s the only thing keeping you up?”

  “Yeah, Ma. I have to do it.”

  “You don’t want to talk?”

  “I’m fine, Ma. Just stop. Please.”

  “You haven’t told anyone, have you?” she said.

  He shook his head.

  “What happened with Kevin and Bobby? Not even Colleen?”

  “No, Ma. Jesus.”

  “You can’t trust anyone,” she said. “See how quickly they can turn on you?”

  He nodded. “I know.”

  She bent over and hugged him. “Good night,” she said.

  “Good night.”

  He remained rigid against her embrace. Rather than look at his mother, he kept his eyes on the text that explained some event a hundred years prior. When she left, he gave up on the book and threw it to the floor. He pushed himself up and sat on the edge of the bed, both his elbows resting on his knees. He pushed up his sleeve on the left side. The inside of his upper arm was growing cluttered with the small, smiling burns. It hurt, somewhere inside, to see his body so abused. But there was something else in him that said he deserved it, that told him he deserved worse—it wanted to cover his whole body with the burns, it wanted worse. He winced and shook his head, but it wouldn’t stop.

  He held the lighter out and flicked the flame to life. He counted slowly. He moved his thumb back from the rollers, maintaining pressure on the plastic tab, keeping the flame alive. When he passed one hundred, he turned the lighter around in his hand and gripped it. He rested his opposite arm across his thigh, his palm facing the ceiling. He brought the hot metal down on the inside of his forearm. His arm bucked to get away, but he held it there as the heat of the metal dissipated into his flesh. He leaned back on his bed and let the lighter fall away.

  His mind was clear for a moment, but soon the same circle of thoughts plagued him again. N
o matter how he went about it, he always came back to the fact that she had shaken her head. It hadn’t been like that, he told himself. But it had. But it hadn’t. But it had.

  15

  For the rest of the week, the boy took Terry’s bus and waited at his house for a couple of hours before heading home. To be safe, he walked in the woods and along an old railroad grade that paralleled one of the roads between their homes.

  He was quickly developing a habit of smoking grass. Terry handed him small amounts in the twisted-off corners of sandwich bags and in turn the boy gave him a five-or ten-dollar bill. If it was early he went for a walk in the woods, and if it was late he turned off his bedroom lights, stuffed pillows under the covers, and proceeded out the window to the roof.

  There were times that were quite beautiful: stars, the smells of wood—living, dying, and dead—the silhouettes of large pine boughs rocking in the wind. There were also times when he panicked over a sound in the house and everything went to shit.

  While most of what had occurred in his life could account for his general ill feeling, it was another run-in with the Youth that had made one of the days notably worse than the rest.

  He’d come face-to-face with Colleen in the school hallway between periods. There was a moment where neither of them spoke.

  “I didn’t say it like they said it,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “I didn’t,” she said. “I swear.”

  “I figured.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  “They can’t stop talking about it.” She pouted and he felt like he was falling for her all over again. “No matter what I say. It doesn’t matter.”

  “I know what you mean,” he said.

  “I thought they’d be over it faster.” Suddenly she looked over his shoulder. Her smile disappeared and she looked at the floor. Before the boy could look back, a hand grabbed his shoulder and spun him around.

  “What are you thinking?” Jason Becker barked at him.

  He froze, a frightened stare on his face.

  “You think you can talk to her?” Becker said it loudly enough that the kids coursing down the hallway looked. Some even stopped to look.