Sloppy Firsts

  "I figured that I’ve been a good boy long enough to talk to you without arousing suspicion," he said, flicking a cigarette lighter open and shut. Open and shut.

  "Uh-huh." I chewed my lip.

  "We could be talking about homework." Open and shut.

  "Uh-huh." Chew.

  "Comparing notes." Open.

  "Uh-huh." Chew. Chew.

  "Making a study date." Shut.

  "Uh-huh." Chew. Chew. Chew.

  Marcus threw the lighter in the backseat and spun in his seat to face me. He paused long enough for my skin to get all electric and tingly in anticipation, like every hair on my body was standing on end, but wasn’t.

  "I never read The Seagull’s Voice because I think it’s a big, steaming turd," he said. "An opinion that has only deepened since my literary contribution was rejected."

  I knew all about this. Havisham had discovered Marcus’s lack of participation on the paper and assigned him a story about the improved nutrition guidelines for the cafeteria. He turned in a poem titled, "Requiem for Sloppy Joes." It didn’t make it into print. I only know this because Havisham complained to me about his insubordination. I, of course, was dying to read it, but Havisham had already turned it over to his guidance counselor to be put in his file.

  "Len told me to check out your editorial today."

  Len Levy. My man, I owe you big-time.

  "I’m sorry I didn’t read it sooner," he said, twisting his blue-and-white polka-dot tie. "It was the first good thing that heap of dung has ever printed. An instant classic."

  He liked it. Marcus Flutie liked my editorial.

  "If I had known that calling you a poseur would have inspired you like that, I would’ve pissed you off sooner."

  He let go of the tie and it unfurled in a blue-and-white blur.

  Too many words at once. I was overwhelmed.

  Suddenly, my mom’s Volvo pulled into the driveway. Christ! I had to get out of there and fast.

  "Uh, that’s my mom," I said, pointing at the high-strung blond woman straining to see who had the audacity to park this huge Cadillac in front of her perfectly landscaped front yard. As any Realtor knows, appearance is everything. "I gotta go."

  "It’s too late," he said. "You’re already caught."

  True, I was going to have to face the Guy Inquisition, no matter what. I wanted to get out of there before she rapped her rings on the window and screamed, Get away from my property! But I needed to ask him a question first, and somehow, I finally got up the nerve to do it.

  "Marcus?"

  "Yes?"

  "Uh, that note you wrote me? You know, after the uh, incident last year?"

  "Yesssssssssssssss."

  "Uh, what did it say?"

  He jerked his head quickly, as if to shake the words he’d just heard out of his ears.

  "You didn’t read it?"

  "Uh, well, I uh, kinda lost it before I got a chance to."

  He rested his head on the steering wheel, saying nothing.

  "Was it important?"

  After a few seconds of silence, Marcus snapped to attention.

  "You know what?" he said. "It’s better you didn’t read it."

  Now I was totally confused.

  "What? Why?"

  "It’s just better," he said, "Trust me."

  Trust him. Trust Marcus Flutie. Oh, dear God. Why did I feel like I could?

  My mom was pacing on our front porch, seconds away from pouncing. I really had to get out of there before she totally embarrassed me.

  "Thanks for what you said about my editorial."

  "Thanks for writing it."

  Marcus then leaned across me to open the passenger-side door. He was invading my personal space, as I had learned in Psych class, and I instinctively sank back into the seat. That just made him move in closer. I was practically one with the leather at this point, and unless I hopped into the backseat, there was nowhere else for me to go. Marcus was within whispering distance.

  "I’ll talk to you later."

  In any other context, that would have been a throwaway, something to say to put a nice tidy end to a conversation. But in this case, it meant more. I just know it.

  Why must tomorrow be Saturday?!

  Milliseconds after the Caddie pulled out and I was safe at my doorstep, my mom asked me who the driver was.

  "Nobody you know," I said.

  "Is he your boyfriend?"

  "No way, Mom."

  "A friend?"

  "Uh, no."

  "Well then who is he?"

  "Just a boy, Mom," I said. "He’s nobody."

  "He can’t be nobody, Jessie."

  I can’t remember the last time my mom was so right about something. Marcus Flutie had zero chance at being my boyfriend and had even less of a shot at being a real friend to me. But that conversation in the Caddie guaranteed that Marcus Flutie would never be nobody. At least, not to me.

  november

  the fourth

  Lalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalaladeeda.

  There is only one reason why I am able to stay so calm about the Clueless Crew. One reason why I don’t care that they’re conspicuously ignoring me or—in Sara’s case—starting an E-mail campaign to the entire junior class to make everyone hate me as much as she does. One reason why my physical therapy sessions don’t seem to hurt as much anymore. One reason why I’m not bothered by the sudden and renewed interest my dad has in my life now that it looks like I might be rehabilitated in time to run some races during indoor track season. One reason why my mom’s endless chatter about Bethany’s Thanksgiving visit hasn’t made me puncture my eardrums with a sharp stick.

  And that reason is Marcus Flutie.

  Talk to you later, he said. Really, he meant it.

  It all seemed so hopeless on Monday morning. He didn’t talk to me before homeroom because he was too busy macking with Mia, his moronic girlfriend. He didn’t talk to me during homeroom. He didn’t talk to me after homeroom because he was too busy macking with Mia. Again.

  When he sat down in back of me in first period, I assumed we were back to our silent-partners-in-crime routine. But then he tapped me on the shoulder, and said something so random that I was afraid he was back on the junk.

  "Did you know that the average American spends six months of his or her life waiting for red lights to turn green?"

  "What?"

  "Six months wasted, waiting for permission to move on," he said.

  "Uh-huh."

  "Think of all the other stuff you could do with that time."

  I was totally confused. "In the car?"

  "In your life," he said.

  "Oh."

  Then Bee Gee started talking about FDR’s New Deal and that was the end of that.

  And so it went for the rest of the week. Before History class, Marcus would tap me on the shoulder and ask me a question that, on the surface, had nothing to do with anything. But then it would evolve into a conversation about something much more than I expected, considering the randomness of the opening statement. It’s hard to explain. It was like a verbal Rorschach test.

  By Friday, I wasn’t surprised that asking me to pick my favorite actor wasn’t really about choosing between John Cusack and the guy who played Jake Ryan in Sixteen Candles, but a way to launch into a discussion about how every magazine article or TV appearance that brings a star "closer" to his fans actually adds another brick to the towering altar at which we worship the cult of celebrity.

  Or something like that.

  These conversations are like a shot of schnapps with a Tabasco-sauce chaser. Short, sweet, and strange, as well as capable of making me hot, wobbly, and confused.

  What a difference a week makes. Just 168 hours ago, we didn’t talk. Now we do. Of course, the downside to this maxim is that by next Friday, it could all be over between us.

  I can’t let that happen. There are too many issues we haven’t discussed that need to be covered before we can continue
this … whatever relationship: The Dannon Incident. The Origami Mouth. Middlebury. Mia. Three boxes of donuts. Heath’s death. Hope.

  Knowing what I do about his need for nocturnal amusement, I’ve decided to take control of Monday’s conversation by asking Marcus a more straightforward question: I can’t sleep at night. Can you?

  Let’s see how this evolves.

  the ninth

  He called!

  Caller ID is the best invention ever, ever, ever. Because seeing Marcus’s name and number in the tiny window gave me just enough time to take a long, deep, anti-hyperventilation breath before speaking.

  "Hello?" I said, high-pitched, as though I’d just taken a drag off a helium tank.

  "Tonight I’m not going to ask you a question to make you talk," Marcus said, without so much as a hey, hi, or how’s it going.

  "No?"

  "Nah," he said. "The question was a conversational construct."

  "A what?"

  "Just something I threw out there to get us started."

  "Oh."

  "But we don’t need it anymore."

  "We don’t?"

  "We don’t," he said. "We can talk just fine without it."

  For one hour and forty-seven minutes, we proved him right.

  Here, an incomplete list of topics from tonight’s convo: pregnant chads, the Olsen twins, the AIDS epidemic in Africa, fake tattoos, Igpay Atinlay, the universe’s unseen dimensions, cloning, clichéd guitar gods in leather pants, year-round schooling, plastic-surgery junkies, Napster.

  I can’t remember the last time I had a conversation like this. I discovered I had opinions about things that I didn’t even know I had opinions on. Unlike computer-genius Cal, whose conversational shtick now seems so … Calculated in retrospect, talking to Marcus is an exercise in spontaneity. He jumps from topic to topic, often without finishing up one train of thought before branching off into another, which splinters off into another, and another, and so on. So one conversation with him contains a bizillion schizophrenic discussions. ADD all the way. Or maybe it’s all the drugs. Who knows? All I do know is that he told me to call him at midnight whenever I’m in the mood to talk because that’s when he’s in the mood to talk.

  Talking to Marcus reinforced for me what I already know: I have such a narrow, PHS-obsessed worldview. I’ve almost lost the ability to carry on a conversation about anything other than myself. Even with Hope. Most of our convos are spent catching up on daily comings and goings—the parts I can tell her. It didn’t used to be this way, of course, when she was here. But even then, we didn’t have talks like the one I had with Marcus tonight. Not worse, just different. Perhaps it’s because Marcus is so different.

  I’m trying to convince myself that this isn’t a bad thing. I mean, anything that helps me sleep must be good for me, right? Because after I got off the phone with Marcus, I crashed like a narcoleptic. A slumber so blissfully uninterrupted by worry that I woke up this morning feeling wide-eyed, alive, and ready to face whatever PHS crap came my way today.

  I had thought that as soon as I got Marcus alone, on the phone, I would bombard him with a bizillion questions about his side of our history. But after last night’s talk, I hope Marcus and I continue to sidestep the tricky issues that exist between us, because I feel like the moment we acknowledge out loud who he is and who I am and why we shouldn’t be talking to each other, we’ll stop talking to each other. And that can’t happen.

  the thirteenth

  Knowing what I know about Marcus through my spying, it would be easy for me to bring up subjects that interest him, if I had to. He doesn’t know my bio like I know his. This is why, after five consecutive nights of conversations, I am continually amazed by his ability to bring up subjects that I want to talk about.

  "I was watching The Real World tonight …"

  "You watch The Real World?" I asked, excitedly. "I loooooove The Real World. Even with all the new reality shows, it’s still the best. It’s one of the few forms of entertainment targeted at our generation that I just eat up."

  "Oh you do, do you?"

  "I’d rather watch real kids make total asses out of themselves than watch Kevin Williamson’s creations be so goddamn perfect and profound all the time."

  "I think that’s sad," he said.

  "Why? They’re setting themselves up. They’re asking for it."

  "They’re setting you up," he said.

  "How?"

  "Did you ever stop to think that the term ’reality TV’ is an oxymoron? Once these people agree to be filmed, it guarantees that these shows have nothing to do with reality."

  Marcus is the only person who even comes close to one-upping me knowledge-wise. And it kind of bothers me, to tell you the truth. "I know all about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, genius boy," I said, getting testy. "What’s wrong with entertainment as escapism?"

  "Nothing," he said. "Unless you have no problem spending an evening watching a bunch of people you don’t know live life instead of going out there and living it yourself."

  He had a point. My obsession with The Real World had only gotten out of hand after Hope moved away.

  "And how can you live life in Pineville, especially in the middle of the night?"

  I heard the flick of his lighter in the background. A pause. Then a burst of breath.

  "Well, I used to fire up Puff Daddy."

  "Puff Daddy," I repeated, totally stymied.

  "Yes. Puff Daddy. My bong."

  "You named your bong?"

  "Sure. I spent more time with Puffy than anyone else, so it made sense."

  Another pause. Another lungful of nicotine, tar, and tobacco. I remembered the pre-pube boy on the Boardwalk. Wacky for Tobacky.

  "I’d also find girls to have sex with."

  He said it so casually. Find girls to have sex with. No big deal. But it was because this is the closest we’d come so far to talking about anything personal. Then he took a long drag on his cigarette, no doubt to give me a moment to imagine him having sex with every scintillating, fleshy detail intact. I had to let him think this talk didn’t freak me out.

  "So sex and drugs are a way of living life?"

  "Yeah," he said. "Isn’t that what being young is all about? These are our prime years for experimentation, for exploration. I thought I’d experiment and explore to the extreme."

  "That’s so … jackassinine," I said.

  "Yeah, it’s jackassinine," he said. "But that’s what made it fun."

  This was making me really angry. How could he be so blasé and blatantly self-destructive? Especially when one of his best friends died because of all of it. Not to mention that as a result of that death, my best friend was taken away from me. But I opted not to directly confront him about Heath. His guilty confession should come naturally or not at all.

  "If it’s so much fun, why don’t you do it anymore? Why not give Middlebury the finger and just go back to your old ways?"

  "Because it’s been done," he said. "About the only thing I hadn’t done was go straight-edge, all the way."

  Of course. After his teenybopper T-shirt experiments last year, Marcus must’ve known that making himself into the model student would be the ultimate method for messing with everyone’s minds.

  "Besides, I’ve found other things to do with my time," he said.

  "Like what?"

  "Like playing Nirvana songs on my guitar, writing in my journal, talking to the fogues. I use my wisdom to help Len get laid. And I’m having my first completely nonsexual relationship with a female."

  "Wait," I said, totally confused. "So you’re not having sex with Mia?"

  Marcus laughed harder than I’ve ever heard anyone laugh in my life. A stereophonic, surround-sound laugh. It was the kind of laugh that squeezes all the air out of your belly and leaves you gasping for oxygen. It was the kind of laugh that could leave you with permanent brain damage, which is what I must have in order to have said what I did in the first place.

 
"You’re too funny," he said. "Good night, Cuz."

  Marcus finds me completely nonsexual. No tension to complicate our whatever relationship. I should be relieved. Right?

  the fifteenth

  Today my second editorial came out: "Homecoming King and Queen: Democracy at Its Dumbest." It got the expected reaction: The people who already hate me still do. The people who don’t hate me still don’t—and thanked me for my visionary remarks.

  "Students care more about the homecoming elections than they do about the presidential controversy," I said. "They should just eliminate the whole homecoming court because it gives popular people power and prestige that goes right to their heads."

  "So I take it you’re boycotting the homecoming dance," he said.

  "Of course I’m boycotting." My moral crusade was a very convenient way of dealing with the fact that no one had asked me.

  "Too bad."

  "Why too bad?"

  "Mjdfuwx bv nlkhr’po ydrhext," he said, muffling his mouth with his hand.

  "I must have wax buildup," I said. "Could you repeat that?"

  "Because we could have doubled," he said.

  "You’re going to homecoming?"

  "Yes," he said.

  "You’re going to homecoming?"

  "Yes."

  "You, Marcus Flutie, are going to homecoming."

  "I think we’ve adequately covered the fact that I am going to the homecoming dance."

  "You want to go to homecoming?"

  "I could live without it," he said. "But Mia really wants to go."

  It’s very easy to forget Marcus even has a girlfriend, so infrequently does he mention her. It’s only at times like this, or when I catch them tonguing down in the halls, that I remember this fact: I am his first nonsexual female friend.

  "That’s so hypocritical!" I cried. "You’re totally selling out. You’re turning into exactly the type of homecoming-going, goody-goody honors student the administration wants you to be."

  Marcus chuckled.

  "Selling out? I’m not the one who wrote the anti-homecoming editorial."

  "But you agree with it."

  "I’ve never been to homecoming, so I don’t know whether I agree with it or not."

  This Hy-inspired excuse just infuriated me.