“That’s awesome! How do I get one of those cards? Do I have to marry you?”
Oh shit. What did I just say?
“Uh…” Christine looks at me like I grew out of the base of a tree. “You could develop leprosy and lose half your face—that would work. Then you could get a handicapped pass.”
We’re halfway down the hall, heading toward the exit. I’m thinking of some witty final statement to make up for the marriage thing (did she say something about leprosy?) when I spot a figure at the doors: Jake Dillinger. He looks all Czechoslovakian-model-banging and student-govern-mental. He cups his mouth.
“—Jeremy—” is all I can make from down the hall; he must be saying hi to me. Jake parcels out whole tenths of a second when he sees me. Then he looks directly at Christine. He doesn’t need to say anything to her.
“Gotta go!” Christine says. “Talk tomorrow!” And she skips down the hall to meet Jake, like Puck would skip, like he worked some magic on her yesterday that went completely over my head. I swivel round quickly so I don’t have to see them hug or tongue or dry hump, greet each other in whatever way they’ve picked. Then I walk out the back door of Middle Borough.
Michael’s there, in the school parking lot. He managed to borrow the car from his parents and have it waiting for me the day I asked for it. I hug him.
“What’s up?” Michael’s got a handball—he was probably playing for money while I was in rehearsal. He tosses it lazily against the mural in the back of school.
“Same crap is up,” I say. “Christine, who I thought was at least available, is with Jake Dillinger.”
“That’s messed,” Michael shakes his head. “But you gotta give other men credit, y’know?”
“No. I don’t know.”
Michael tosses the handball at me. I try to catch but it bounces off my fingers and chin. “C’mon,” he says. “Throw the ball at the wall. See the wall?”
“Shut up.” I rear back and throw pretty hard; the ball rebounds and Michael lunges to hit it, seemingly with his wrist—there’s a pop. I look over but he’s grinning, not hurt, as the ball comes hurtling back toward me. It hits my skull and careens off under some school administrator’s car. Michael and I laugh.
“C’mon,” he says. “We got like twenty minutes if you really want to go to Halloween Adventure.”
“OK.” We head to Michael’s car.
I’ve never been entirely sure what Michael’s driving status is; he probably has a learner’s permit that doesn’t allow him to drive by himself, but since you can’t violate any laws in a huge brown Buick going 25 mph, we stay out of trouble. I slip inside—it smells like burned peanut butter and ham.
Michael puts some God-awful emo tape on. I look out the window as we roll away from school.
“Oh, I forgot, you hate this, right?” Michael asks, pointing at the music. “I can play Pinkerton.”
“It’s OK,” I say. Michael can put on whatever music he wants (except maybe Pinkerton) because I love driving. I’ve always loved it. I never understood how little kids can ask “Are we there yet?” or want to pee all the time—since I was two, when the family had the Volvo, I’ve been content to hang my head out the window and just watch the scenery. I used to like seeing houses and hills that I hadn’t seen before, but this is Jersey—that got old quick. So now I do this new thing: I look at the houses and guess about the people inside. Are they old? Are they pretty? Are they girls that like me?
“So tell me,” Michael breaches. “How come you want Christine so bad?”
I turn to him. “Um, I dig her.”
“How come?”
“She’s hot.” I catch myself: “She’s smart too.”
“And you don’t want to just hook up with her? You want to date her and stuff?”
“Yeah!”
“Huh. Do you like your shirts?”
I look down at what I’m wearing: a Star Wars Episode I T-shirt. “They’re OK, I guess.”
“Well, if you like your shirts, you might not want to date any girls. Girls are like the arch-nemeses of shirts,” Michael says.
“Really.”
“Oh yeah. Shirts are their trophies. The last girl my brother went out with, she ended up with, like, three of his shirts. He used to come home wearing a jacket and no shirt. Don’t go dating girls unless you’re willing to lose shirts. You might just want to do whatever, and the girls will show up eventually and not take your shirts.”
“Hey Michael.” I almost forgot. “What’s up with that thing your brother had? The pill that made him smart? How did that work again?”
“I thought you didn’t believe in that.”
“Well, it’s tough to imagine he got a 1530 on his SATs.”
“Heh. Yeah. Well, I told you.”
“He had electronic assistance or something? I mean, I heard about these guys at Columbia—”
“No, man,” Michael says, gripping the wheel. “This is a totally different thing. I think it’s called a ‘script’.”
I look at him carefully.
“Like it scripts in your mind, so it’s a ‘script’, this computer that comes in a pill, y’know? Experimental junk the government is doing.”
“OK. And he really had one?”
“Yeah.” Michael pulls up to Halloween Adventure. “Go quick, they’re almost closed.”
I go into the store thinking about the script but forgetting pretty quickly because I have to beg the attendant for a little extra time to track down and pay for a Scary Movie mask. It’s so dumb; it almost dares me to buy it. I figure with it on, no one’ll be able to recognise me and all I’ll have to do is wear black pants and a black shirt and if I get Christine alone and we have that amazing high-school romantic movie moment, with drinking and young lust and strawberry-flavoured lip gloss, I can rip the mask off and she can see me for who I really am and we’ll start having sex against a tree maybe and—
“Jesus,” Michael says as I walk out of the store with the mask on. “You’re the one that needs the pill, man; that is stupid.”
The next week, in play rehearsal, I fall into a pattern with Christine. (What does it take for a behaviour to become a pattern? One repetition, right?) I come in, grab the seat next to her and bumblingly mention a quasi-fact about music or current events or evolution, often stolen from Michael. She humours me (or maybe not, sometimes she seems to smile humour-free) with comments of her own and we build that, falteringly, into a conversation that ends five minutes after play rehearsal and then she runs off to meet Jake. Only I don’t know what to make of her and Jake. They never talk to each other during play rehearsal; he sits across the circle from her and eyes her only occasionally. Is it possible they’re just friends?
That’s one thing I hate about, uh, the world. I hate touchy-feely friend relationships between guys and girls. I hate them when I’m in them, of course, but I’m not in them too often so mostly I just hate them from outside. They’re confusing and complicating: if you’re