Every Exquisite Thing

  Coach looked at my parents for support, and my dad dutifully said, “Don’t talk to your coach like that, Nanette. There’s no need for swearing.”

  “Why don’t I let you sort this out as a family,” Coach said to my parents. He looked pale, like he was starting to fear me. “See you at practice tomorrow, Nanette.”

  It was the first time he ever used my real name, and it was a moment for me. He respected my wishes because I had something he wanted but wouldn’t give up easily, and that was the only reason why. I had asked him to call me Nanette many times during my freshman year when I was competing for a varsity position, but he’d completely ignored me. I suddenly felt an unfamiliar sense of power.

  “No, you won’t,” I said. “I quit.”

  Coach shook his head and then retreated.

  Dad said, “Why are you doing this?”

  “She doesn’t like playing soccer,” Mom said. “Simple as that. It’s just a game.”

  “A game that could pay for her college education.”

  “We have a college fund for her. We’re not exactly poor.”

  “That’s not the point!”

  “She was playing for you, Don. But she’s not a little girl anymore.”

  “Sports make women out of girls. Statistically speaking, girls who play varsity sports are more likely to—”

  “Please,” Mom said. “Like that’s the reason you want her to play.”

  My parents argued like that for a time, and at some point I got up and went to my bedroom. I’m not sure they noticed.

  Shannon called and yelled at me for making her look bad in front of the team—for “undermining her authority”—calling me a “crazy bitch traitor.” She was ranting and raving when I hung up on her. She called back several times and left messages on my voice mail, but I didn’t listen to them.

  I called Alex and told him that I was not afraid anymore—that I had quit the soccer team.

  “They’ll try to make you afraid again,” he told me. “But you have to stay strong for a little bit before they’ll leave you alone. Trust me. I know the drill.”

  My teammates e-mailed and called, and Shannon visited my bedroom, trying a different tactic—all of them begging me to play “one more season,” Shannon saying she needed me to get her assists and lock up her scholarship. “I need a goal-scorer to finish my crosses!” Suddenly, I was no longer a “crazy bitch traitor.” But I had made up my mind and didn’t return to the field, which felt sort of thrilling—making a choice for myself.

  To solidify things, I cut the first day of my senior year and had Alex drive us to the beach.

  Cutting was an automatic suspension from the team, and one of the few rules that was actually enforced. So I called the school secretary and told her I was cutting. “Call my parents. Report me to all the appropriate authority figures. I expect to be punished to the fullest extent of the law. Please let Coach Miller know.”

  Alex cut his school because I asked him to—I said that I needed him.

  I had never needed a boy before, and I wondered if Booker had some type of psychic powers.

  Could he see the future?

  After an hour’s drive, we found a beach that didn’t have a lifeguard and therefore wasn’t all that crowded.

  We swam out into the Atlantic and floated on our backs.

  I thought about Unproductive Ted and why he sat alone all day long on his rock.

  I was glad to have Alex with me, but I also felt like I could be alone with Alex, too, which was a new feeling—being alone with another person.

  I swam over to Alex and kissed him on the lips.

  He kissed me back using his tongue.

  My first French kiss.

  We wrapped our arms around each other, and soon he was hard—I could tell because it was pressing up against my naked stomach below in the sea.

  Neither of us said anything about that.

  We only kissed.

  And I wasn’t afraid, like I thought I would be.

  When I returned to school the next day, none of my teammates looked at me—not even Shannon. I heard a few kids cough when I walked by and then say “Um—muff diver” really fast. Or “carpet muncher.” Or “scissor sister.” And I wondered if the head of the Gay-Straight Alliance could be up to her old tricks again. I was exercising my heterosexuality for the first time in my life, but that wasn’t something I wanted to share with the idiots who attended my high school. So I wore the lesbian comments like a mask that kept everything I really loved private and safe and beyond the dirty grasp of the people who didn’t know the real, true me and never would. And regardless, I had nothing against lesbians. My classmates were ignorant douche bags.

  When my father stopped eating dinner with us, Mom brought up his chewing again, saying, “Well, at least there will be no mouth-breathing.” Then she said, “I don’t know if I love him anymore, Nanette. Does that make you hate me?”

  It was a shitty trick to play—her being honest like that—when I was just starting to be honest myself. It didn’t seem like everyone could or should be honest at the same time—like maybe the structure of the world wasn’t built to handle such mass amounts of truth. Or maybe I sensed the cracks in my parents’ marriage long ago, and that’s what had finally freed me to start being me no matter the cost.

  I had Alex and my secret world with Booker, both of which were so much better than anything my high school or my family had to offer.

  “I don’t think it really matters, Mom,” I said. “Because I won’t be here forever, will I?”

  My mom looked at me for a moment and then she started to cry.

  13

  The Boy Can Be a Boy

  SO I PLAYED THE CYCLOPS

  By Alex Redmer

  There’s a place where middle

  School kids go to fight

  And everyone knows where it is

  Even the teachers and parents

  It’s past the playground

  On the other side of a hill

  Atop which kids can look down

  And jeer and snarl and clap

  As noses explode and

  Knees launch up into groans

  And shirts are ripped

  I go there now even

  Though I am too old

  And tall enough to cast

  A shadow for miles

  And I close one eye

  So the kids will think I am

  A Cyclops who moans and

  Grunts instead of speaking

  I go because there is often a

  Kid who reminds me of me

  When I was in middle school—

  Round, red-cheeked, outnumbered

  With his fists up just below his glasses

  Showing infinitely more guts than

  The cocky boy who had the crowd

  On his side before he even lifted

  His symphony-conductor hands

  I usually just yell and moan and play

  The monster until everyone runs away

  And I’m left with the round lonely boy

  Who was me just a few years ago

  And I’ll tell him middle school

  Doesn’t

  Last

  Forever

  He doesn’t ever believe me

  But I can tell he’s always glad

  I stopped by

  This one time I came too late

  And the pretty, thin boy

  Had the ugly, round

  Boy on his back, pinned

  Knees on elbows and

  Pretty was slapping Ugly

  Whose red tear-streaked cheeks

  Made the crowd roar

  And so I opened both eyes

  Became me again

  Ran down the hill

  Picked up the pretty boy by the

  Belt and collar and threw him

  High into the air

  So that he would know

  What it feels like to fall

  His head hit the ground first??
?hard

  Enough for grass stains

  On his cheek and nose

  And I sat on his chest

  And I slapped his face

  And I told him that his days

  Were numbered

  And today was zero

  I am the Bubblegum Reaper!

  I am the Bubblegum Reaper!

  I am the Bubblegum Reaper!

  I am the Bubblegum Reaper!

  I am the Bubblegum Reaper!

  I said with each slap

  And then I released him like

  A fish you catch in polluted

  Water and cannot eat

  The young round boy stayed behind

  When the rest left and he said,

  “They’re gonna kill me tomorrow”

  So I walked that kid home

  And I talked to his mom

  Who fed me dinner

  And I told her she needed

  To help

  Or at least notice

  I went to the old middle school

  The next day after high school

  And the round kid was looking scared

  Again, surrounded by pretty boys

  So I played the Cyclops once more

  And they all ran, like pretty boys do

  I taught the kid to close

  One eye and moan

  Like a monster

  Whenever the pretty boys

  Get too close

  And now as he waves his arms

  Over his head screaming

  He is almost

  A Cyclops too

  But not quite yet

  It’s okay because pretty boys

  They don’t know

  The

  Difference

  Most

  Of

  The

  Time

  And so

  The boy can be a boy

  A little bit longer

  14

  Shifted the Conversation Like a Knife Across My Throat

  The soccer team kept winning games without me. Shannon kept running to the flag and crossing the ball, and other girls started to score, and soon the hateful glances I was receiving in the hallway turned into no glances at all. Maybe I was far enough away from the cage. Maybe they couldn’t whack me anymore.

  Free from varsity-soccer-cult rules, I began sitting on an outdoor bench during lunch periods to read Alex’s poetry or The Bubblegum Reaper, because we were trying to determine once and for all if Wrigley had fallen for Stella or Lena and were certain that there must be a clue we were missing.

  Alex had written a poem called “So I Played the Cyclops,” which thrilled and scared me simultaneously. When he gave me a traced copy, he said it was based on an experience he had “not so long ago,” when he started hanging around his old middle school, looking for lonely kids who needed help. He did this because he used to fantasize about someone coming to help him when he was being picked on in middle school. He also did it to be like his hero, Wrigley.

  The poem made me think about the high school boys who used to come to my middle school with bottles of peach schnapps, looking to bribe younger girls into giving them head. Alex was the opposite of those boys at the center of our middle school sex scandal. I loved him for that. But the rage that was so evident in his poetry was a little frightening, too. I didn’t want to date a Cyclops.

  “Did you really throw some eighth grader through the air?” I asked him after I had read the poem. We were parked in a field with the Jeep’s top down, looking up at a hunter’s moon glowing like an enormous flaming pumpkin just over the distant trees. Alex wanted me to listen to a song called “Midnight Surprise” by Lightspeed Champion in the open fall air. It was a really cool song. Weird in a good way. And almost ten minutes long. After it was over, I told him I enjoyed the experience, and we talked about the lyrics at length. Then I said, “Did you really slap the pretty boy in your poem? You must have been twice his size.”

  “So was Wrigley when he held that kid underwater. The kid who was spinning Unproductive Ted. Remember?”

  “Yeah, but that was just a fictional story.”

  “No, it wasn’t. Wake up, princess,” he said, referencing “Midnight Surprise.”

  “You think Booker really did that? You think he actually almost drowned a little kid?”

  “Sometimes you have to fight against it,” Alex said. “If you don’t fight against it, you lose yourself.”

  “Fight against what?”

  “Everything and everyone who make you feel small, insignificant.”

  “You can fight with poetry.”

  “Sometimes words just aren’t enough for the situation at hand.”

  “Yeah, but violence? That’s never good.”

  “Not good, but sometimes necessary when people try to make you believe you are secondary or that you shouldn’t even exist. Why do you think we study wars in history class? How many months do we spend on World War II alone? When someone evil crosses that line—like Hitler or Mussolini or Tojo or more recently Hussein and bin Laden—it’s time to fight. That’s what they teach us. So why is it okay for our government to drop bombs on people and kill with guns, but we aren’t supposed to use our fists to protect ourselves? This country was founded on and by violence. Our ancestors played the Cyclops when we wanted to steal the land from the indigenous people who were here before us. FDR and Truman both played the Cyclops during World War II. Bush played the Cyclops after 9/11, too.”

  I’d never heard Alex speak so intensely. I couldn’t tell if he was serious or just riffing on ideas, like in his poems, so I said, “Maybe so. But you can’t compare middle school kids to Hitler and bin Laden!”

  “Both Hitler and bin Laden were once fourteen.”

  “And you haven’t been elected president of the United States of America!”

  “Not yet,” he said, and then laughed, which made me believe that he was just talking shit—that it was all theoretical.

  “You also have to be careful not to make others feel small and insignificant, right?” I said. “You don’t want to become what you hate. You can’t just go all vigilante. What if everyone did that?”

  He was quiet for a time, and then he said, “How did it feel to give your soccer team two middle fingers? To say ‘motherfucking’ in front of your coach?”

  “Truthfully?” I said, and then laughed. “Motherfucking amazing.”

  “Maybe you held back for too long and then you had to explode. Maybe there was no middle ground left. Sometimes we need to get violent with our words because no one is listening otherwise.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t physically hurt anyone.”

  Alex looked up at the hunter’s moon, which had turned from orange to bloodred, and when he didn’t say anything in response, I said, “What happened to the kid in the poem? The round one with the glasses? The kid the pretty boys wanted to fight?”

  “Oliver?”

  “His name is Oliver?”

  “Yeah. There’s no such thing as fiction. We actually hang out now.” Alex gave me a devilish grin, like he had been leading me to Oliver all along. Like this whole conversation was planned. “You wanna meet him?”

  “Seriously?”

  “I’ve kind of been waiting for the right time to introduce you two.”

  “You have?”

  “No time like the present. Let’s go.”

  Alex started the Jeep and turned up his favorite band, Los Campesinos!

  “This song’s called ‘In Medias Res,’” he said. “It’s Latin. Know what that means?”

  I shook my head.

  “‘Into the midst.’ It’s also a storytelling technique. You start in the middle of things. With action. No setup. Just get to the heart of it right away. Like when a war film opens up in the middle of a battle before you even know who’s fighting or about what. ‘In Medias Res.’”

  “And it’s how we met. In medias res. At Booker’s. Over dinner,” I said.

  “Yeah, it was, wasn
’t it?”

  I loved talking with Alex about music and writing, mostly because it was so natural—almost like watching a hunter’s moon rise, something I had never even thought of doing before Booker introduced me to Alex. And yet it was all so refreshingly odd, too.

  I smiled at him, reached over, and squeezed his thigh through his dark jeans, and then he turned up the song even more and pushed down on the gas pedal.

  We drove for about twenty minutes or so before he turned down the radio and pulled up to a tiny house with dirty green siding in a poorer neighborhood I didn’t know.

  “Shhh,” Alex said, holding his index finger up to his lips, and then I followed him around to the back of the house. He knocked on the first-floor window three times. The shade went up, and then Oliver’s big glasses were looking at us through a screen, which was quickly raised so that we could climb through the window, which we did.

  Oliver looked a lot like Ralphie from A Christmas Story.

  “Is this your woman?” the kid asked Alex, trying to sound manly and tough maybe.

  “Um… what?” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” Oliver said from his wooden desk chair, and then looked at his lap.

  Alex punched him lightly on the arm and said, “Oliver, this is my good friend, Nanette. Nanette, this is my main man, Oliver. Good people meet good people.”

  “Alex talks about you all the time,” Oliver said, and then pushed his heavy glasses up his nose. “You’re even prettier than he makes you out to be.”

  “Thank you,” I said, blushing. No one other than my dad and mom had ever called me pretty before.

  “But it’s her intelligence that makes me all hot and bothered,” Alex said, and then sort of bear-hugged Oliver, who squealed with delight. It was like they were brothers.

  The bedroom door opened and a middle-aged woman stuck her head in. “You’re allowed to use the front door, Alex. And you’re welcome anytime, day or night. You know that.”