Unexpectedly, Milo

by Matthew Dicks

  For a moment, he feared that she wouldn’t. Then she began speaking again.

  I wasn’t a popular kid in school. I wasn’t exactly unpopular, and that was part of the problem. When I was in elementary school, I was in the top group of kids. Back then, we were all sorted by ability, so the smartest kids were in Group One and we all knew it. The teachers even called us Group One. A notch below us were the kids in Group Two, then Group Three, and so on. The bottom group of kids didn’t even get a number. They were the T Group. T stood for transitional, I think, but I never understood what the hell that meant. We used to say that the T stood for ’tards, but it should’ve stood for tough, because that’s the kind of life that most of those kids had.

  Anyway, in elementary school, I was friends with most of the kids in my class. We were still little kids, so none of the middle school bullshit had started yet. There were no popular and unpopular kids. Just smart kids and not-so-smart kids. I was with the same twenty or so classmates starting in first grade, and they were all basically my friends. The girls at least, and some of the boys too. All the smartest kids in my grade. All the kids who were going to be popular in high school. All the goddamn prom kings and queens stuffed into one classroom.

  But once we hit middle school, things changed. Clothes, makeup, and jewelry started to matter, and my family didn’t have a lot of money. Hell, I didn’t think we had any money. I was wearing worn-out sneakers in January and eating macaroni and cheese for dinner every night. Try walking home in pink Keds through three feet of snow. Not fun, and not easy to hide from the other kids.

  I was clueless about a lot of things too, and all of a sudden the right clothes and the right haircut and the right number of jelly bracelets made all the difference in the world. It seemed like overnight I went from a girl with lots of friends to someone on the outside looking in. Probably not true, but that’s how it seemed at the time. I thought the other girls hated me, but the truth was probably worse: They just stopped noticing me. A few of them kept inviting me to birthday parties out of habit, or maybe because their parents forced them to, but to me, things seemed fine until middle school. And the funny thing is, if I hadn’t been in Group One, things might have been different. I could’ve been friends with girls in Group Two or Three. Even some of the T Group kids wouldn’t have been bad. I might’ve been a little smarter than them, but a lot of those girls dressed just like me. Keds and Kmart specials. Funny how our tests scores seemed to almost always match the amount of money our parents made. Except for a handful of kids, like me. For us, life sucked. I was smart enough for Group One but poor enough for Group Three.

  But by then, I had the Group One stink about me. The other kids saw us as brains. And at the same time, my friends started seeing me as slightly beneath them. The wrong clothes, the wrong shoes, the wrong hairstyle, and a serious lack of makeup. I was caught in the middle, smart enough to be in Group One for the forty-five minutes of class but useless when the bell rang. Me and a couple other girls in my boat, Meghan Phelps, or Phillips, and Kristen Sloane, clung to those Group One friends like our lives depended on it, doing almost anything to remain in their good graces, but by the time we reached eighth grade, the birthday party invitations had stopped and the lunch tables had gotten emptier and emptier. Halfway through eighth grade, there were days when I was eating alone. Eight kids to a table, and depending on who was absent that day, I was often the odd girl out. You can’t imagine the embarrassment of sitting in a school cafeteria all by yourself. In high school, I’d actually skip lunch and go to the library just so that I wouldn’t be seen sitting by myself. Better to be not seen at all.

  And here’s the saddest part. I liked Meghan and Kristen a lot. Lisa Palumbo too. Another tweener like me. Smart but no money and terrible skin. The four of us could’ve been friends. Good friends. Me and Lisa and Kristen and Meghan. But to become their friends and be seen hanging out with those girls would’ve meant admitting to my second-tier status. Instead of getting closer to those girls, I tried to distance myself from them, as if that would make it clear to everyone that I was better than them.

  There were only a couple times after elementary school that I felt in the good graces of my old Group One friends. Kim Maynard. Melissa Davis. Annette Ryler. Charity Dumars. All those girls who I admired and hated at the same time. The first time was in the fall of eighth grade. Mrs. Walker’s language arts class. First floor. Harry Truman Middle School. I was sitting in the back row one day when I was called on to diagram a sentence on the board. I think I was the only kid in the fucking world who liked to diagram sentences. No wonder I had no friends.

  On the way back to my seat, I noticed Sherry Ferroni, a fellow Group One reject but a hell of a lot worse than me. She was a girl who had started out cute in first grade but was fat by seventh grade. Poor was bad enough. Fat and poor was a killer. Anyway, she was sitting in the third or fourth row, and a red blotch was clearly visible on the crotch of her shorts. Yellow shorts too. Like three sizes too small. The worst. She had gotten her period and didn’t know it. Probably the first time the poor girl had gotten it, and in that moment, I saw my opening. A chance to increase my status at Sherry’s expense. I went back to my seat, leaned over to Kim Maynard, and told her the news. She got up immediately and went to the front of the room to throw something away and caught her own view of Sherry’s growing stain on the way back to her seat. Kim sat down, looked at me, and mouthed the words “Oh my God!” And in that moment, in those three little words, I was back in the Group One fold. Buddies with Kim, just like we were in second grade again.

  I spread the news around the class as best as I could, and before long, everyone was finding a reason to get out of their seat and walk by Sherry. Pencils needed sharpening. Bathroom passes were being asked for left and right. Every boy in the class was suddenly coughing and needing a drink from the water fountain. Every excuse in the book to get up and take a peek. Kids started giggling, the whispering got louder, and finally Mrs. Walker stopped the class and demanded to know what the hell was going on. Asshole extraordinaire Glenn Trudel then announced the news to the class, even though almost all of them already knew.

  “Sherry needs a rag, Mrs. Walker. She needs one bad!” he said.

  God. I’ll never forget it.

  Sherry looked lost for a minute, clueless about the asshole’s comment, and then I saw her begin to figure things out. She looked around the room, saw the kids giggling and whispering and staring, and then she looked down and saw. Then she put her hands over her crotch like a three-year-old that’s pissed her pants and ran out of the room.

  She was out of school for the rest of the week, and when she came back on Monday, kids had a nickname ready for her: Ragamuffin. The popular kids used it behind her back and the scumbags said it to her face. I think it stuck all the way through high school.

  Of course, Kim and Melissa and Charity didn’t like me any better after that. I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess it’s sometimes nice to see someone other than yourself put down. In some twisted way, I thought that bringing down someone like Sherry would automatically increase my standing, like there was a pecking order and my meanness would move me up a couple spots. But it didn’t matter if I was above or below Sherry, because I was never going to crack that top group again. No matter what I did, I wasn’t going to get back into that pack of popular Group One girls.

  Freckles paused for a moment, and Milo used the opportunity to stop the tape, consumed by an odd blend of emotions. Though he felt genuine sorrow for Freckles, who was clearly plagued by childhood cruelty, he also couldn’t help but feel a sense of camaraderie in her confession, knowing full well how difficult childhood could be, especially as an outsider. Though Milo also wasn’t a popular kid in school, he had found a niche of friends through his participation on the cross-country team and the chess club (which eventually morphed into his first Dungeons & Dragons group). He didn’t have many friends, but he had a few good ones and had never been forced to endu
re a lunch period alone. But he remembered the kids who did and suddenly felt as cruel to them as Freckles had been to Sherry Ferroni that day in Mrs. Walker’s language arts class.

  Not that high school had been easy for Milo. Even with his modicum of social standing, he had been a late bloomer in terms of dating, though initially he had thought it would be otherwise. Milo could remember with remarkable clarity the day in Mrs. Shultz’s sixth grade math class when he noticed Amy McDonald’s breasts for the first time. In Milo’s mind (and perhaps it was true), it was as if one day her chest was as flat as his own and the next day it wasn’t. Small round orbs were suddenly protruding from Amy’s yellow and peach sweater, and Milo could barely take his eyes off them. Forget her blue eyes, her high cheekbones, or her impossibly wide smile. It was all about the boobs. And sure, he had seen breasts under sweaters before (and had even seen the bare breasts of a neighborhood mom as she passed by her picture window one evening), but he had never understood their magnificence and allure until he had seen them on a girl his own age. And in that moment of recognition, any possibility of a homosexual future was erased with the startling launch of an erection from beneath his corduroy hand-me-downs. The unconscious and damn near traitorous act of his penis had forced him to conceal its exuberance beneath Principles of Mathematics, the textbook that had rarely served Milo as well as it did at that particular moment.

  Despite the awkwardness of sporting a boner in math class, Milo had felt nearly euphoric that day. It was as if the universe had opened and revealed one of its greatest secrets to him, and like Gollum’s hoarding of the Ring, he was determined to keep this precious treasure to himself, revealing his revelation to no one.

  Of course, Milo later learned that he was probably already behind the curve in terms of noticing Amy McDonald’s breasts. His innate shyness and desire to keep certain aspects of his life private (even back then he struggled with inexplicable demands) prevented him from dating until late in his junior year, when a sophomore named Jennifer Ray showed interest in him despite his awkwardness and verbal incapacity around girls. Before that, Milo had doubted that any girl would ever like him and had already resigned himself to that fate. As a member of the crosscountry team, he could remember passing through Boston one autumn afternoon on his way to the state championships in Lynn, Massachusetts. As the bus drove past the exit for Chinatown, one of his teammates announced, “If you ever need a hooker, that’s the neighborhood for you!” Milo had filed this information away, determined to remember it, certain that the only sex he would ever have would be with a prostitute, when he was old enough to venture into the seedy parts of Boston and find one for himself.

  He had never told anyone that story but wished in this moment that he could tell Freckles. Let her know she wasn’t alone in her childhood secrets.

  He might not be willing to tell her about the submariner and his demands, but suddenly Milo’s childhood secrets didn’t seem so bad after all. If only he could help Freckles understand this. He knew it was ridiculous to think this way. Freckles was, after all, a complete stranger. For all he knew, these tapes were ten years old and she had long since overcome the specter of her adolescent indiscretions, but still, he couldn’t help but feel a need to come to her aid and relieve this unnecessary sense of guilt that was burdening her. And the more he watched the tapes and learned about her life, the greater this need to help her intensified.

  Milo took a moment to jot down several bits of information gleaned from the tape.

  Mrs. Walker

  Harry Truman Middle School

  Sherry Ferroni

  Freckles had mentioned other names too, but he would have to rewind the tape if he needed them. In his fixation on the footage, he had forgotten to write down a single word. He would go back and get the names later, if needed. For now he reached over and pressed play.

  Well, that took longer than I thought. Damn, it’s almost two A.M. But at least it was something. More than hospital cafeterias and Jell-O. God. I haven’t thought about some of those people for years. I wonder where Sherry Ferroni is today.

  Anyway, I’m going to try to go to sleep now. I have a fight at ten tomorrow and need some sleep if I’m not going to lose in the first three minutes.

  Milo saw Freckles’s hand reach for the camera, probably motioning to turn it off, but then it stopped in midair. She paused for a moment then brought the camera up to her face, so close that only the center features of her face—her short nose, her blue eyes, and those large brown freckles—appeared on screen. Her next words were said in a whisper.

  I’m sorry, Sherry. I really, really am sorry. I hope you can forgive me.

  Milo thought that she might cry had the tape continued a second longer, but instead the screen went black, then blue, indicating that tape number three had reached its end. Had it been a second or two longer, Milo thought that he might’ve cried too.

  Instead, he picked up his pencil one more time and added the word Fight to the list, followed by a question mark. Though he desperately wanted to pop in tape number four, he resisted the urge and turned off the television and the camera.

  Finally, he would keep his promise and do a little research.

  chapter 12

  Timothy Coger reached out and shook Milo’s hand, something he did quite often, usually at the conclusion of some minor piece of business. At first it unnerved Milo, but he had grown accustomed to the odd habit after a while.

  Milo would assist his client in paying some bills. Mr. Coger would extend his hand after the envelopes had been sealed.

  Milo would replace the screens on the front and back doors with glass for the winter. Timothy Coger would vigorously shake his hand upon the task’s completion.

  Milo would set the VCR to record a PBS documentary or a rerun of Newhart, and his client would offer his hand in thanks.

  There were days when Milo shook Timothy Coger’s hand a dozen times, and once he shook the man’s hand three times in the span of a minute, after Milo had dispatched with a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses on the doorstep (handshake), watered the geraniums on the same doorstep (another handshake), and retrieved the mail from the box on the corner (a third handshake). In Timothy Coger’s estimation, the completion of any chore represented the conclusion of a business transaction, and as such, a handshake was required.

  Though shopping was something that Timothy Coger no longer did alone (lifting the bags had become too difficult for him, and Milo suspected that he was becoming more and more anxious about being outside his home), his client had no desire to march around the supermarket with a babysitter either, so he and Milo always shopped separately, with Mr. Coger starting at the front of the store in the produce section and Milo moving to the rear of the store to begin in dairy. They would typically pass each other at some point in the course of their shopping, in the cereal or cookie and cracker aisle, and Mr. Coger would say hello to Milo as if they hadn’t seen each other in a week, only to meet at the front of the store by the cash registers minutes later in order to check out together.

  Milo never ceased to find this amusing.

  On days like today, when Milo had no shopping of his own, he would browse the magazine and book aisle while waiting for his client to fill his shopping cart with necessities, for Timothy Coger bought nothing else. Bread and cereal but never a Pop-Tart. Orange juice and milk but never a beer. The man owned a dishwasher but had washed every dish by hand since his wife died, declaring dish detergent to be a waste of money. Milo wondered if his client might ask him to purchase a washboard soon, forgoing the expense of laundry detergent and fabric softener for a bucket and some soap.

  Only the essentials for Timothy Coger.

  Milo was skimming the cover article in the latest Scientific American magazine, trying to rid his mind of Freckles, Christine, and all the drama that seemed to recently be dominating his life, when Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising” began filtering from the speakers in the ceiling, filling the store with the Boss’s song a
bout the despair and hope in the aftermath of 9/11. Standing in the supermarket on a Sunday morning, amid the ordinariness of linoleum floors, rack-mounted magazines, and fluorescent lighting, Milo cringed at the way a song that had come to symbolize one of the most tragic events in American history was suddenly infusing the drone of consumerism.

  He and Christine had been in New York City on September 11, 2001, walking through Central Park on their way to a conference on elderly housing alternatives in Midtown when the planes struck the towers. It was still the dawn of their relationship. Year two. They had just moved in together prior to the trip, and Milo was still giddy over the prospect of any woman becoming his wife. So far, he had managed to conceal his inexplicable demands from his future bride, rapidly developing coping mechanisms that allowed him to satisfy them without detection, and he couldn’t have been more pleased. Most of it had simply involved preparation and forethought.

  A stash of jelly jars in the basement, as well as an emergency supply in the trunk of his car.

  The twenty-four-hour bowling alley in Vernon, a coup in terms of his ability to handle this demand on a timely basis.

  And most important, his planned shift from the hourly grind of the hospital to a schedule that was more flexible and accommodating to his unexpected yet insistent demands.

  Things were truly falling into place.

  Milo had wished that his future wife was a little less concerned about her appearance, a little more accepting of his friends and their hobbies, and a little less interested in network television and tabloid magazines, but in Milo’s view, at least on the day that they were crossing Central Park, beggars couldn’t be choosers. After all, he was once a teenage boy who had thought that the only sex he’d ever have would be with a prostitute. The acceptance and love that he had already received from Christine, albeit under somewhat false pretenses, was more than he had ever hoped for.