Ginger Kid

by Steve Hofstetter

  Hearing someone outside my apartment, I peeled back a sliver of the duct tape that covered the object formerly known as peephole and saw Kunal trying to figure out what to do. He noticed the light and started yelling through the door.

  “Come on, Steve! You can’t stay in there forever.” Which was a stupid thing for someone in a hallway to yell at someone in his own apartment. But he was right, sort of—I couldn’t stay in there if I wanted to record a kill. And I did want that. I wanted to record a kill badly. Recording a kill got you respect. At this point, half my six-man team was already dead and we had zero kills among us. I could hide, but we were a week into Killer already, and I was tired of playing defense.

  I could get out of the apartment if I wanted to. Our windows had grates on them, so I could grab one, lower myself, and drop down to the street. I could then walk through my own front door and blindside Kunal. It was perfect—I just had to figure out a way to keep Kunal at the door.

  I thought of using the mini recorder I had from covering Knicks games to play a tape of my voice like it was Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but I quickly realized no one would fall for that. As I searched for another solution, my mother came home and saw Kunal in the hall, stalking the door. As my mother demanded an explanation, I took my chance. I swung the door open, dropped to the ground, and shot up. Kunal was hit before he even knew what was happening. Risk reaps reward. Kunal wasn’t happy, but all is fair in love and war.

  Word got out at school the next day that I’d recorded a kill at my own front door, and at first people were pleasantly surprised. I got words of congratulations and pats on the shoulder as people walked by. And then word got around that my mother had helped me. My mother had most certainly not helped me—at least not purposely. At worst, she was an unwitting human shield. Still, moms are killers of Killer. She may as well have called everyone in Queens and asked them to ride the bus with me again.

  Later that day, another teammate of mine was taken out and the focus shifted away from my mother. Now, I had only one teammate left alive.

  Every year, Hunter has a three-day trip to Washington, DC, for some of the seniors taking government classes. It’s called Washington Seminar or more frequently Wash Sem because most people believe that shortening words makes you cool. I find that to be infuri.

  The rules of Killer stated that people on Wash Sem couldn’t kill each other. Sure, some of us jumped over cars, but you don’t take a toy gun through a metal detector. Even we knew better than that.

  The rules of Killer said nothing about non–Wash Sem people not being able to kill those who were on the trip. Wash Sem kills by non–Wash Sem people weren’t explicitly outlawed because no one was crazy enough to try. We were New Yorkers—most of us didn’t have cars or even driver’s licenses. How the hell could any of us get to DC if we weren’t on that school-sanctioned trip?

  That night, I was talking to Nick about how our time in Killer was basically over. Nick was inexplicably my only teammate left standing. In a fit of impulsivity, I said, “We should go to DC tomorrow.” Because Nick is Nick, he agreed.

  We decided we’d skip school, something I had only ever done once before but Nick was intimately familiar with, and meet at the Port Authority Bus Station. The last time I skipped school to see a movie, I got into Columbia. Maybe this time I’d be elected senator.

  I’d never taken a Greyhound before and I’d never been farther from New York than Baltimore. While DC is not much farther than Baltimore, this bus trip was a pretty crazy idea. I got to Port Authority first and bought my ticket while I waited for Nick. He was about fifteen minutes late—because he’d gotten killed on the way to meeting me.

  Going to DC suddenly went from a dumb idea to an impossible idea. I had two opponents at Wash Sem—how could I possibly shoot them both by myself? They might have their guns on them (we always had our guns on us), and it would be very hard to shoot one without the other seeing. Or, much worse, without being caught by a teacher.

  But I’d spent all the babysitting money I’d had on that ticket. I told Nick that if he came with me, I’d still go. He could help keep a lookout, and if I got caught, well, I would be a legend for trying. I liked the feeling I’d gotten when I climbed through that ceiling to take the mascot. And I wanted it again.

  That was the shortest five-hour bus ride in history. We were excited for the sheer madness of what lay ahead. And we had to make plans. How were we going to ever find Wash Sem? Sure, we’d go to the area of DC with all the government buildings, but then what? Neither Nick nor I had ever been to DC before. We’d have to be smart about this. We’d have to be smart about our extremely stupid plan.

  When we got to Washington, DC, I found a pay phone and called Hunter pretending to be the secretary of Joe J.’s father. I allegedly had an urgent message to get to Joe, so I was hoping the school could put me in touch. The person who answered told me the name of the hotel the students were staying at, but I knew we couldn’t just wait at the hotel all day and still get back to New York at a reasonable hour. I tried again.

  “Is there any way I could get it to Joe sooner?” I asked, almost calling him “Joe J.” out of habit. “Do you have an itinerary? I don’t mean to trouble you, but it’s of the utmost importance.”

  I figured utmost importance is something important people say. And the teacher who’d answered the phone bought my act.

  “I’m sorry,” the teacher said. “It’s not like we can get a message to him at the Department of Education.”

  I laughed, said “of course not,” hung up, and told Nick we were headed to the Department of Education.

  When Nick and I arrived, the school busses were out front, and we knew we had our opponents cornered. Just to make sure, I walked into the lobby and asked the guard if the tour from Hunter had left yet. She told me it hadn’t, and I thanked her profusely while I explained that I’d missed the bus from the hotel and just wanted to catch up with them. She offered to radio to the tour, and I politely declined, explaining that I’d feel so guilty bothering them, it was my fault, and I would just wait patiently outside. I left, proud of my quick lie, ironically knowing that the guard admired my honesty.

  I also left knowing for sure that no one went in or out of that building without going through a metal detector first. My opponents would be completely unsuspecting and completely unarmed.

  The difficult part would be to kill two people by myself without any teachers seeing. I figured I’d use the other students on the trip as witnesses. Every student at Hunter, regardless of whether they played or not, respected the tradition of Killer. I knew no one would rat me out. When Wash Sem emerged from the building, I popped up from behind the stairs and shot Joe J. in the back so that he wouldn’t see what happened, but other people would. I did not wanting him alerting his teammate.

  Once Joe J. was dead (whether he knew it or not), I ran up to my other opponent, tapped him on the shoulder so he would definitely see me, plugged him in the chest, and ran as fast as I could away so that none of the teachers could see what happened. All I heard behind me was him cursing and the rest of the students laughing as Nick and I got around the block as fast as we could.

  We’d done it. Our completely foolhardy mission had actually worked. Nick and I had a few hours to spare before we needed to catch another bus, so we walked around DC on that beautiful spring day, looking at the monuments to America’s forefathers and feeling a little revolutionary ourselves.

  By the time we got back to New York, word had already spread. People were surprised when I danced at junior prom, when I stole the mascot, and when I recorded my first kill. But this was outright shock. This was the quiet kid that had been a nonentity for so many years pulling off something that no one had ever even thought to do. This was me, for the first time, being cool.

  I died the next day. After school, two of my opponents showed up at my apartment to take me out; I had gotten three kills and was the only one on my team preventing the wheel from getting small
er. I thought of climbing out the window and ambushing them, but before I could, they figured out something Kunal hadn’t—that they could peel the duct tape back, too. They opened up the peephole and rained tracers upon me. At first, it was tough to admit it was over. I never saw or felt a tracer actually hit me, and I had had so much fun with the game that I wanted to keep playing until the end. But I must have been hit, and I was tired. I agreed to the kill, and my game was over. As they say, you can’t win them all.

  I knew Killer was just a silly game, but I was really proud of how I played. I racked up my three kills because I wasn’t afraid. I could have let the feeling of defeat stop me before I ever went to DC. Instead, I pressed on and achieved one of the silliest victories of my life. Recording those kills in DC is my “I threw four touchdowns in a single game” glory-days story that I’ll have forever—even if, in the end, I did get shot through a peephole. That was just one more thing ruined by my mother’s penchant for procrastination.

  When I got to college, we played a version of Killer called Assassins. The game was also supposed to last two weeks, but I won the whole thing in three days. They say high school prepares you for college. Sometimes, they are right.

  KEEP IN TOUCH!

  I was never a fan of the Hunter yearbook, mainly because every year, the “cool” kids ran it. Ours was run by The Clique, and the years before us were just run by the Cliques of other grades.

  The yearbook often took cheap shots at people for their looks, because that’s what the cool kids found to be cool. Even as a teenager I knew that comedy was best when it involved punching up and not down.

  My first tangle with the yearbook came as a sophomore, when one of the photographers snapped a picture of me to use in a Separated-at-Birth feature. The joke was that I was so pale, I was separated at birth from a piece of paper. The only thing is, the writer was dumb enough to use a picture of a piece of loose leaf paper; so the joke fell flat enough that it was cut from the final version of the yearbook. I would have triumphantly said, “Go find someone else to make fun of!”, but they were already too busy finding someone else to make fun of.

  The other yearbook tradition that was tough was the ads. Each senior got a free half-page with our picture and a few quotes, but most of the book was taken up by purchased ads. The rich families bought full pages to congratulate their children on their graduation, and the rich kids also bought pages to congratulate each other. Sometimes couples took out ads, which I imagine became particularly funny after they had broken up by Thanksgiving.

  “You know all that stuff I said about ‘eternal love’ in the yearbook?” she’d say to him on a hurried phone call. “Well, you go to college across the country, and there is this guy on my floor who has a pet rabbit . . .”

  I kept my page simple—one picture and one quote: “Love is the most important thing in life, but baseball is pretty good, too.”

  I was supposed to have four appearances in the yearbook—my mandatory half-page and group pictures on the clubs pages for softball, Brick Prison, and improv. I assumed that I wouldn’t be part of an ad because I couldn’t afford to contribute to one. I had no idea that the choice was out of my hands—and not for reasons involving money.

  One Monday, Randy and Ozzie pulled Jacob and me aside to tell us that our group of friends had gotten together over the weekend and taken pictures for a yearbook ad without us. What was worse was that Randy and Ozzie were just invited to hang without being told why, because everyone knew that they would tell us. Our exclusion wasn’t just an oversight. It was on purpose.

  Ozzie tried to make me feel better, reminding me of the expense of yearbook ads and saying that Jacob and I just weren’t as close with some of the group as they were. He was right about both, but that didn’t make our exclusion feel any better. Jacob and I were hurt, and we had every right to be.

  That day, I went to Jacob’s apartment after school, and it was impossible to keep our frustration a secret from his mother. We were angry, and we were betrayed. We felt that just when we had finally gotten comfortable at school, the rug had been pulled out from under us.

  I’d felt this way before—when I lost the USY election. It was the realization that some of my friends weren’t who I thought they were. Some of them weren’t my friends at all.

  “Why don’t we just get your own ad?” Jacob’s mother asked. “Show those boys how much fun you have without them?”

  We tried to explain how expensive an ad was, and how it would look silly if we got one-eighth of a page compared to their full page. We tried to explain how our anger was about much more than the ad. And in our condescension to her, we hadn’t realized that Jacob’s mother was generously offering to pay for it.

  Jacob’s mother already knew why we were upset. She was suggesting that we didn’t have to wallow in our anger—instead we could turn the yearbook into something we could have fun with. So we did.

  As Jacob and I discussed ideas for the ad, just the two of us together in the yearbook began to make sense. Jacob had been there for me since the beginning, and I had been there for him. We laid out a page with baseballs and guitars and our favorite quotes from A Tribe Called Quest. We had a lot of fun getting that page together.

  The realization that the rest of the group didn’t care about me like I thought they did didn’t matter as much anymore. I still had Jacob as a close friend—and Randy and Ozzie were good enough friends to tell us what happened and stick up for us, even if their defense hadn’t worked. Being left out of the yearbook ad cemented the lesson I’d learned in USY the previous year. I didn’t need a dozen casual friends. I had a few close ones, and that’s what mattered.

  By the time the rest of the guys apologized, Jacob and I weren’t even upset anymore.

  “No hard feelings,” I said to Joe J. “If I’d embarrassed me at Killer, I’d be mad at me, too.”

  Okay, so I was upset enough to throw some shade at Joe J. But not nearly as upset as I would have been if I’d been separated at birth from paper.

  DOING THE WRONG THING BY DOING THE RIGHT THING

  Some of the most surprising words I’ve ever heard were, “Rebecca Chaikin wants you to ask her to prom.” I may as well have won homecoming king again.

  I hadn’t dated anyone since Colleen Barrett. I hadn’t even had a major crush on anyone since Colleen Barrett. I was still attracted to girls, but none had really grabbed my attention in the way they had in the past. Part of that was because I was finally receiving validation in other areas of my life and no longer needed it from one single person. Part of that was because I was maturing, realizing that truly getting along with a woman was more important than whether or not she was the first in my grade to grow boobs. Mostly that second thing.

  I was friendly with Rebecca’s group of friends. There were five girls in that group. Shayla (the one who told me about Rebecca’s desire to go to prom) lived in Forest Hills, so Jacob and I would often see her on the subway. Paulina was one of my copresidents in the improv club. Anya was Ozzie’s best friend. And Lilian didn’t talk much, which I didn’t hold against her because, hey, we’ve all been there.

  Rebecca was my favorite of the group, and we’d been friends for most of our time at Hunter. She was smart and sarcastic but also kind. She was someone who was protective of her people and didn’t take any garbage from those outside her circle.

  Rebecca was objectively attractive, I knew that. She was one of those girls who starts high school looking like a boy and graduates looking like a boy’s fantasy. By senior year, people had caught on, and a lot of people had crushes on Rebecca Chaikin. But in a very unlike me way, I wasn’t one of them. I just liked hanging out with her.

  When Shayla told me that Rebecca wanted me to ask her to prom, it came out of nowhere, but I was flattered. I took the night to think about it. Going to prom with Rebecca seemed like a great idea. A prom limo with a group of people I liked was appealing, and so was a date I’d enjoy spending the evening with. It certainly beat
my original plan, which was no plan at all. I asked Rebecca the next morning, and she said yes and gave me a kiss on the cheek.

  Rebecca and I solidified plans that night on the phone. And the closer prom got, the more often we talked. Eventually, our conversations became an everyday thing. We were hanging out in the hall during free periods and eating lunch together and saying goodbye before we went home. It was like we were a couple, except without all of the making out stuff.

  It is a strange thing to suddenly realize you’re attracted to someone who’s already been in your life in another role for such a long time. With Rebecca, it happened one day when she didn’t call me back. She had good reason—I found out the next day that her parents were punishing her for coming home late without calling and that they had taken away her phone privileges (something much easier to do back when phones were bolted to the wall). But that night, I was sad. And that’s when I realized, “Oh, this is more than a friend now.” I realized that I wanted to spend time with her always.

  Unfortunately, Rebecca didn’t feel the same. I knew that because part of our friendship was her talking to me about the guy she liked. I didn’t mind at first since I’d originally put myself in the friend zone. But once I realized I had feelings for Rebecca, I tried to subtly change the conversation whenever dating came up. I wasn’t as subtle as I thought I was.

  “Rebecca knows you like her,” Shayla said, surprising me once more. Shayla definitely had a penchant for gossip. I’d matured enough to know denial of gossip is taken as confirmation, so I simply responded “I know” to take the wind out of Shayla’s sails. If Shayla thought that the gossip was no big deal to me, perhaps she wouldn’t go around school telling everyone else. My deflection worked, and the rumor died there. But now Rebecca knew, and I knew Rebecca knew. I wondered if this would change our daily routine.

  Thankfully, it didn’t. Rebecca and I still spent just as much time together and still spent time every day on the phone. That didn’t mean that Rebecca liked me, too. But it did mean that Rebecca still enjoyed spending time with me and didn’t mind that I liked her. I’d already accepted that she wasn’t interested, but I’d have been crushed if it had meant the end of our friendship.