Perfectly Good White Boy

by Carrie Mesrobian

  Our kitchen table being circular, Neecie could see Krista’s face and my mom’s face, and all three of them babbled together without even including me, which was okay. Neecie seemed back in School Mode, like she was being called on to participate in class, something she did when she had to, though she never volunteered. It wasn’t clear to me whether she enjoyed this kind of behavior or if it just came so natural she didn’t even notice. Either way, the conversation went along fine. Until Krista asked Neecie about her post-graduation plans and Neecie told her about the schools she was applying to.

  “That’s wonderful that you’re going to college,” my mom said. And I was sure she’d use this as an opportunity to rail on me for not applying anywhere yet.

  But Krista was the one who brought it up. It was like they took turns, rotating who would bug me about the future.

  “Sean is so smart,” Krista said. “He really needs to go to college.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said.

  “You’re just thinking grades are the only thing that matters,” my mom said.

  “Well, they kind of are. When you’re talking about school,” I pointed out.

  “Test scores are also important,” Neecie said, but it was in this shy peep of a voice, like she knew I wasn’t loving this discussion.

  “Community college is a good place to get started,” my mom said, trying to sound all casual as she patted seeds into the black soil.

  “Totally,” Krista agreed. “And the tuition costs way less.”

  “I guess it’s up to Sean, though,” Neecie said. “He’s got to decide, right?”

  Then nobody said anything, even Krista, and we just went back to miserably potting the goddamn flowers until Brad busted in carrying the dog food on his shoulder.

  “I got that Senior Formula for weight loss,” Brad said. “Since Otis is kind of a fatty.”

  “He’s not that fat,” I said.

  “He’s fat as fuck, are you nuts?” Brad said, unloading the kibble bag into the giant bin in the pantry with a big rushing clatter.

  “Hon? Who’s that friend of yours who went to DeVry? The one who makes all that money installing furnaces?” Krista asked Brad. Then they traded the guy’s name back and forth and asked me if I knew him, and I shrugged.

  “Don’t you think Sean would do good in that kind of program?” Krista asked Brad, like Brad was my dad.

  But Brad just shook his head, like he didn’t even see the point of discussing me. He adjusted his cap on his head and said, “Babe, I’m starving. I didn’t get any dinner yet. What did you eat?”

  “There’s stuff for sandwiches in the fridge,” my mom said.

  “I want a pizza,” Brad said, and then, because he was the man, he called for pizza, and a little bit later, me and Neecie were sitting out on the back deck in the dark while Brad ate pizza in the living room and Krista and my mom set up the seedlings in the basement under the grow lights, which made it look like they were growing weed. They were probably the first people in the history of the world to buy grow lights for something actually legitimate.

  Neecie was eating a piece of pizza, all careful with each bite. It was kind of cold, and she had zipped her hoodie up her neck, her long hair trapped underneath it, like she wanted the extra layer for warmth. It made her look a little weird, but also like she didn’t give a shit, which was nice. Hallie was always worrying about her looks; flipping her hair, checking herself out in mirrors, all that.

  “Your family’s nice,” she said.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “They are. They seem really nice.”

  “Brad’s kind of douchey.”

  “Well, yeah,” she said. “But he asked me what I liked on my pizza, didn’t he?”

  Neecie was such a bright-sider sometimes. Finally, she said she needed to get home and so I drove her back into town. She lived in an okay neighborhood, not one of the fancy developments or anything, but not anything like the rental. Once I was in front of her house, she turned to me.

  “Your mom doesn’t know about the Marines thing?”

  “No,” I said. “And she’d freak if she did.”

  “Well, you have to tell her sometime.”

  “Not after I turn eighteen.”

  “I’m sure she’d notice, Sean, if you suddenly went off to boot camp.”

  “By then it’d be too late.”

  “I guess,” Neecie said. “But I don’t see why you can’t just tell her. I mean, explain why you’re doing it.”

  I didn’t have anything to say to that. I thought she’d expect me to explain why I was doing it, the Marines. Though I wasn’t really doing anything yet. But she didn’t. She just kind of hung out with me in my car, talking.

  I don’t remember much more of the evening, though I know we sat in front of her house in my car for a long time. Eddie texted me a photo of a naked chick smoking from a bong shaped like a dick, which was his way of saying he needed me to get some weed from Kerry for him, but I just ignored it. Because I didn’t care. It was nice, just sitting there, talking, her being just so regular and not hyper, her hair trapped under her hoodie, her hands on the knees of her jeans, not making me feel weird like she wanted to go on a date or anything. Like, people who said guys and girls couldn’t be friends had to be wrong. Because that’s what it felt like. Like there was no bullshit or games. Like we were just friends.

  So that was the first night we hung out, even though there wasn’t a big thing said about it. After that, we just kept hanging out like it was normal. Like it wasn’t a secret that got us together. But, still, we weren’t really together. I didn’t want to fuck her, and she didn’t want to go out with me, either. I didn’t care if I picked her up after she’d been with Tristan. I didn’t care what she thought about me, because clearly she didn’t care about what I thought of her and that was nice, because normally, when I liked a girl, I was so tense around her I could barely speak. So this was all nice, because I thought she was cool, in all these different ways, like her hearing thing that made me have to think about what I said, whether I meant it, whether I wanted her to really know it. How she was like this stealth sex ninja, how cool and above-it-all she acted around Tristan at school. And at work, how she underhandedly worked to piss off Kerry with country music and requests from the supply closet and wearing shirts that showed off her boobs. (She didn’t realize she was doing that last thing. Probably.)

  The one thing I remember from that night in the car, when we just sat there and talked forever, was when I said something about Tristan and how it seemed like no big deal, how they hooked up and that was it, and if guys did that and no one cared, why should she care? I was trying to make her feel badass, better about herself, but she shook her head. Looked me straight in the face, the only light coming from her garage floodlight, and said, “I know. I wish it was. But it just makes me feel so bad sometimes.”

  Chapter Eight

  It was two days before Thanksgiving. My birthday was the day before Thanksgiving this year, which meant we always had a cake with our turkey. But in the past, this had often been forgotten in the holiday shuffle. Especially when my dad was still around.

  But this year I didn’t care, because it was snowing like crazy, the first big snow of the season, and I was at Neecie’s house, eating a giant plate of fudge that her little sister Melanie made me. A pre-birthday treat, she said. Melanie was sort of crazed about cooking. She was also sort of crazed in general. But I didn’t care. I loved being at the Albertsons’ house and was happy to not be at home. My mom was talking community college all the time and didn’t I want to tour the one where Steven-Not-Steve taught (he taught accounting, which wasn’t a surprise), and was my “little friend” Neecie coming over again anytime soon, and it just made me want to laugh and also start yelling but I couldn’t do either, because I was signing up for the Marines in secret and if she knew, she’d lose her mind. She was also kind of losing her mind, it seemed like, because my dad was out of the rehab in
Arizona and living in this halfway house thing now. Or he’d just left it. He had some job now, doing something outside. It was all part of the expensive treatment thing Grandpa Chuck had paid for. It was like his eleventh rehab. She kept bugging me to call my dad at this one number, between these certain hours, but I kept putting it off.

  “Try this kind, Sean,” Melanie said, pushing another plate across the counter. Neecie’s kitchen had a little breakfast nook thingy, with stools, and Melanie liked to stand there and feed people her stuff. Melanie had some kind of eating issue, according to Neecie, and it wasn’t exactly an eating disorder, I guess, but something like it, though mostly it looked to me that Melanie was that awkward junior-high skinny where the girl looks like she’s a newborn deer or whatever, all shaky-kneed and stuff. That, along with her braces, and her tendency to do yoga or Pilates in the TV room whenever I came over could have been something pathological or something totally normal. But I never asked; Melanie loved to make food for me to eat. I didn’t really see any reason to probe too deep into the exact reasons why.

  Neecie was somewhere in the house, dicking around. This sometimes happened when I’d come over. She’d get a call and then kind of slip out of the room and ditch me with Melanie or Jessamyn and then come back, like, a half hour later, all showered. Or wearing different clothes. Like, pajamas. Or just a different outfit. Like, she’d sometimes do yoga with Melanie, and then I knew she wanted me to leave, which was fine because, knowing Melanie, I’d get pressed into doing yoga, too, which I’d done a couple times. But I didn’t want to stick my ass in the air while counting my breaths and hoping my hands would unstick from the purple yoga mat if Mrs. Albertson came home suddenly with her boyfriend, Gary, who was nice and everything, but like, a real dude who worked for the telephone company, a guy who climbed up the poles and shit, and while he loved Mrs. Albertson, clearly, from all his touchy behavior with her when he thought no one was looking, I was pretty intent on Gary never seeing my softer side.

  Jessamyn walked in then, stretching, like she’d been asleep. Jessamyn was the sister with the big boobs. She looked older than thirteen, and she didn’t talk as much as Melanie, but she always hung out when I was around. Jessamyn was adopted; she was really Melanie and Neecie’s cousin, but her mother died in a car accident when Jessamyn was six and then her father went crazy or something, couldn’t take care of her, so Mrs. Albertson adopted her. Neecie said it was great to have another sister, but Melanie had a hard time with it, because of being the same age and everything, a sudden twin in life, and going from being the baby to being the middle kid.

  “Why do you always make the most bad foods?” Jessamyn asked Melanie.

  “‘Most bad’ sounds wrong, Jess,” Melanie said.

  Jessamyn sat on the stool by me, picked up a hunk of fudge, and ate it in one bite.

  “It tastes good,” Jessamyn said, taking another slab. Jessamyn totally ignored her sisters like that all the time. “I like the kind without nuts better.”

  It was sort of cool, though I’d never admit it, these girls hanging around me like I was big deal. Even if they were both thirteen. Sometimes I thought Neecie’s sisters liked me more than Neecie did. But then Neecie was always so relaxed about things at her house. She was different than at school. At school she always had her School Face on; in Global Studies, she barely looked at me. But after school, she’d come and talk to me in the parking lot and we’d walk to my car, and the next thing I knew we were going somewhere or we were in a gas station and she was taking a hundred years to pick out which giant can of iced tea she wanted to drink. Then she was all normal.

  “I think I should have put in less butter,” Melanie said, pouring Jessamyn a glass of milk in a little Snoopy glass. “Do you want more milk, Sean?”

  I shook my head. Melanie pushed the milk at Jessamyn and started wiping down the counter.

  Then they started talking about some TV show they watched—the Albertson sisters watched tons of TV shows, in big long marathons, where they set out deliberate, matching snacks and invited people over and made a big huge deal about it, and I didn’t want to admit that we hadn’t had cable in a while and so I mostly avoided discussions about TV. Then I got up to use the bathroom off the kitchen, which smelled so unbelievably good, I barely wanted to piss in there. It was also nicer than my whole house, this bathroom. I mean, not really, but it was like every room in Neecie’s house was designed for you to sit down and relax and grab a home decorating magazine and whatever. This bathroom had a chair in it, next to the shower, and a magazine rack full of issues of House Beautiful and all these little shelves with vases and candles and strange weird things, like a pile of foreign coins in a glass dish or a broken antique telescope thingy and a black-and-white photo of a dog in an old washtub splattering water everywhere. Above the mirror, big blue letters spelled out the word DREAM. There were the same letters in Hallie’s bedroom, only hers said LOVE.

  “Sean?” I could hear Neecie calling for me somewhere in the house. “Sean, are you still here?”

  I flushed, and then my phone buzzed in my pocket from a text. Probably Eddie. He was on fire with the dirty photos lately, since he’d found my Marines crap in my car, so now I got all this gay dude porn where the guys wore dog tags or Army uniforms. I kind of wanted to kill him.

  “Sean?” Neecie banged on the door.

  “I’m in here already! Jesus!” I yelled.

  “Ivy’s here now,” she called through the door. “We’re in the living room.”

  “Okay, just a sec,” I said. You never knew when anyone came over at the Albertsons’ because they didn’t have a dog. It was kind of weird; though there were more people, the lack of dog made everything seem kind of sparse and empty.

  I zipped up and then checked my phone. And almost dropped it in the toilet. Because it was from Hallie:

  home 4 break.

  I felt instantly dizzy. Nervous. And horny. And like doing a million things. For the first time, I wanted to answer this text. Maybe because she was here and it wasn’t just long-distance bullshit? All I knew was that right now I wanted to be in my car, flying to her house. Also I wanted to be brushing my teeth. I wanted to ask Neecie what I should do. But not with stupid Ivy there.

  “What’s up,” I texted back. Hands shaking.

  You pussy. What happened to leaving and never coming back?

  I set the phone on the sink counter. Checked out my hair. It looked messy, but not in a dumb way. Checked my teeth; they were fine, no fudge. There was a zit on the side of my nose, but I’d dealt with it and it was just red. And I’d shaved. And luckily just cut my fingernails, by total coincidence. Hallie had a thing about guys having long fingernails; it grossed her out for some reason. I mean, I guess it was gross, but it hadn’t been a thing I’d noticed until she brought it up.

  The phone buzzed a little on the blue counter, like it wanted to jump off it and crash on the floor.

  I want to see you

  In the living room, Ivy and Neecie were eating fudge and reading magazines. Mrs. Albertson seemed to spend shitpots of money on magazine subscriptions. I said hi to Ivy and then sat down uncomfortably on the same sofa as her, happy that there were a million cushions between us. Ivy’s hair was now normal-colored, but she had it in weird little knobs all around her head and it made her scalp look tortured. I was glad Neecie never did anything with her hair like that. Neecie just wore her hair all long; I think she wanted her hearing aids covered, but it always looked pretty nice, anyway.

  “I don’t see the point, really,” Ivy was saying. “I mean, I don’t even know what I want to do next. Why should I spend the money on the application fee, you know?”

  “You’re saying you want to live with your parents? What the hell is there to know?” Neecie said. “You apply to college to get the hell out of your parents’ house. Not because of college. Not because you’re all excited about learning. I’m a nerd, and even I know that.”

  “You like learning, though,” Ivy
said, smacking another page of the magazine down across her thigh.

  My phone buzzed again. I kind of jumped.

  hurry parents home soon . . .

  “I gotta go,” I said, standing up. I must have looked crazy.

  “What’s going on?” Neecie said. She was suddenly alert, all tense now. The School Version of Neecie.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I just . . . I forgot something I had to do. I’ll come by later? Maybe?”

  Ivy said something to her magazine that sounded bitchy like, “Wow, lucky us.” Ivy and I didn’t hang out much, but she didn’t like me and I didn’t really like her, either. Neecie appeared to not have heard Ivy, though.

  “Okay,” Neecie said. But she sounded like she knew something was up.

  I drove to Hallie’s at pretty much light speed. Parked a block away, then walked around her stupid development, through this little park no one ever used that overlooked this ditch that was filled up by accident, as if it were a real lake or something. The whole place smelled like duckshit in the summer, but now it was covered in snow, everything still as the sun went down early, November-style. I cut through a bunch of backyards to Hallie’s deck and sliding glass door. She’d texted to come through the back. We’d done that before, when she’d snuck out to meet me a few times.

  The house was dark. Quiet. I looked at my phone again. I thought for a terrible minute that maybe she’d meant the text for someone else.

  I knocked, then. Just lightly. And then I heard footsteps. And the door opened, and the room was dark. It was the TV room; I’d sat here a million times waiting for her parents to go to bed while we watched movies together. Me waiting. Dying to touch her.