“He’s a pretty big person to lose track of,” I said.
“You’d be surprised.”
We were in the bathroom, both facing the mirror. I tried out his same medicine, staring him in the eyes. “I guess you could, in that holy hash of mess downstairs.”
I saw him light up with a little bit of fight. Barely, but seeable. Underneath the screw-you was a kid that wanted to protect his dad. Maybe more than he got protected back.
He went downstairs to get towels and things for me, which took so long I forgot about it. I unpacked the clothes out of the suitcase and put them in the drawers. Empty. Go Mattie Kate. Shoved the suitcase under the bed, looked out all three windows: the guy still mowing hay, streetlights on in Jonesville. Put on a clean T-shirt and got in the bed. I was beat up. Almost asleep before Angus knocked on the door and came back in to say he’d left my stuff in the bathroom. I sat up spooked, like in the days of little Haillie popping up out of nowhere.
“Okay. Thanks.”
Angus was altered. Ready for bed, out of the jacket and the hat, in some kind of white stretch outfit that showed the build, skinnier even than I’d thought and small through the waist. A lot of curly, sort of moppy blond hair. What I am saying is, girl hair. A girl build.
We stared at each other, then the door shut and Angus was gone, leaving me to stuff my blown-out brain back in my head and remember what all I’d stupidly said to him, to her. I couldn’t. There was too much. Other than, was she on the JV football squad, pretty memorable. Fang-banging cheerleaders. Had I said I thought we’d be sharing the same room?
I couldn’t fall asleep for wondering how I was so stupid. I guess I’d not been around girls much lately, especially not in those boots. But still. The second I knew, it was plain as daylight. And my mind couldn’t stop running back over every single asshole thing I’d said to Angus, the girl. Starting with, “Like the cattle.”
29
The deal here was, I would get a do-over. Like Stoner did, walking out of our mess to start his clean slate. I’d planned on hating his guts permanently for it. Now came my turn, and I kind of hated my own. How was it fair to Mom, being still alive with all new everything: clothes, room, killer amazing castle house. New grade in a new school where I was the new boy.
The house alone, Mom would have killed for a peep inside of. She used to tell me how she and her friends would lay out of school and break into teachers’ houses in the daytime to see what booze they had, what was in their bedroom drawers, like porn, vibrators, etc. I was living with a teacher. God alone knows what was in his bedroom, but you could open a store with the crap he threw on his living-room floor. Plus beer in the fridge, Jim Beam in the cabinet. Given how early he went to bed, the man was just asking me to teach him how to share.
But that didn’t make life easy. At Jonesville Middle they had two little cement bulldogs on towers out front, like guarding the place, and on it went from there as far as being baby-town. An office lady in her clack-clack heels walked me to my new homeroom, and I’m thinking, Lady I hitchhiked to fucking Nashville, you think I can’t walk down this hall by myself? All these puppy eyes looking at me like, New boy! Please don’t hurt me! Was it a town versus country thing, I don’t know, but these kids were oversize Haillies and Brayleys with their wet-combed hair and buttoned-up shirts, some with breakfast crumbs still around their mouths, I swear to God. Sixth graders. No comprehension.
Did they know more than me as regards pronouns and subjunctions, Roman civilization etc.? Yes. Being checked out of school mentalwise for the last year and then some, I was so far behind it looked like a race with my own ass. But the weirdness wasn’t in what I didn’t know. It’s what I did know. How to watch your back at all times. What a hooker means by “fun” and an asshole means by “discipline” and a caseworker means by “We’re working on it.” And money. Christ. Watching these kids pull it out of their pockets in fistfuls of fives or ones or tens, holding out the whole wad for the lunch lady to pick through, like they don’t know the difference. Or don’t care. Outside at recess, betting and losing actual quarters over utterly ignorant shit, like who holds his breath longest or will that bee fly up Miss Wall’s dress and sting her twat.
What stood between this pack of blind puppies and me was the education of how many batteries drained, bags of garbage hauled, hours clocked in and out, makes the difference between a oner and a ten. I was inked with the shit-prints of life: thrashings, lies told, days of getting peaced out on weed, months of going hungry. I didn’t want to be like these other kids. But I didn’t want to be the freak fish out of water anymore either, dead sick of that. Feeling every minute like somebody’s going to call me out, tell me I’ve got no business walking around that place in expensive new shoes, and should go back to whatever shithole I crawled out of.
The Air Maxes, new jeans and all that, another story of weirdness. Angus took me shopping. Coach headed off to Saturday practice and said to go get me what I needed. Nobody asked me, we just took off in U-Haul’s Mustang, Angus up front with Snake Man, me in the back seat fixing to shit myself. How far would this adventure go before they found out I had smoke-all in the way of cash, being the question. Pretty far, was the answer. I tried telling Angus I would stay and wait while they did their shopping, but she said not to be an idiot, get out of the car. U-Haul stayed. I followed Angus into Walmart, down one aisle after another with her throwing stuff in the cart. First groceries. What did I like to eat, she wanted to know. Anything that’s not rotten, the more the better, I said. She rolled her eyes like I was purposefully being a dick.
“I’m serious,” I said. “You don’t want to know some of the crap I’ve eaten before.”
“Like what?” She frog-eyed me. “Human livers? Used Tampax?”
Jesus. I meant things like the Mr. Goodbar I ate after it ran through the McCobbs’ washer. But this Angus individual was like, frayed-electric-wire level of shocking. I think the boy version worked better, except for that not being a person. She leaned into the cart with her elbows sticking out and tore around the store playing her sick game. She’d hold up a box and yell, “Which do you like better, yo—this, or toe jam? This, or shark piss?”
We left some shoppers ready to lose their lunch and moved on to menswear. I told Angus I wasn’t buying any clothes.
She stared. “What is your deal, dude?”
“No deal. Thanks all the same.”
She shook her head like I was a mental case. Which pissed me off. I didn’t yet know the rules here, fine, but I couldn’t see Angus getting to treat me like a dipshit.
“I like what clothes I have, okay? I’m good. Can we just go?”
“You’re good. This is the look you’re going with, then. Color-blind scrub opens up a can of Wayne’s World.”
“Screw you!” I said. I laughed though, because the other choice was punching a girl, not allowed. Plus she wasn’t wrong. That day I was passable, Bugle Boy T-shirt and army jacket, but I’d been sporting some too-wide collars and a lot of acid wash. Baby-shit-brown tennis shoes, shaped wrong, like shoes from some other century. “It’s not really my stuff,” I said. “I mean, it is. But I got it all free from this girl Jane at my grandmother’s.”
“You’re going for drag queen then, in some Jane person’s clothes.”
“Not hers, her brothers’. Their hand-me-downs.”
“Shut up. Miss Woodall has boys living in her house?”
“No. I never technically saw any brothers. Just their clothes.”
Angus looked me up and down. “May I say the brothers of mystery have handed you down some weird-ass apparel?”
I told her to go to hell, for real. I didn’t feel like explaining how you get used to people looking at you like trash, so it’s hard to care what kind of trash you put on the trash every morning. Or that my other choice of shoes came with a bread bag. I told her I wasn’t color-blind, not that it was any of her business. Just not picky.
“So be picky. Clothes make the man. What’s the Demon angle?”
A coach’s daughter in a castle house gets to have angles. It was not the flat cap today but an old-time man hat with a tiny orange feather in the hatband. And orange Chucks. So like, matching, she’d thought it out. But I had a boy brain, zero cash, and no possible Demon angles. Our cart was blocking traffic around a marked-down underwear rack, and Angus gave no shit.
“Shoes,” she said. “Everything starts there. Essay question. What shoes would you want to wear to the ass-kicking of your worst enemy?”
It was tempting to picture that. Enemies I had. For kicking Stoner across a parking lot, right away my mind started drawing in extra features the shoes would need, like poison-dart spikes and jet packs for a quick getaway. Nothing real, in other words. I couldn’t give any answer, and she acted again like I was being a purposeful irritant.
“Just say!” she yelled. “What the hell kind of shoes would make you happy?”
“Fine, Air Maxes!” I yelled back at her, because who wouldn’t. “But I’m not getting any the hell kind of shoes today because I’m fucking broke, okay?”
Some shoppers hit their brakes, like they’d never heard an f-bomb before. To be fair, there were kiddies about. I notched it down. “I don’t have any money,” I said.
Her gray eyes got that water look they could have. She seemed worried, maybe running her mind backwards over her morning with this new broke-ass version of me, just like I’d had to do after the girl surprise. “Sorry,” she said, and for once I didn’t mind that word. It looked good on Angus. I’d been waiting for it.
