The bus braked hard and jolted forward, rolled me onto my back in the aisle. I could hear Mr. Harris yelling. Jimmy kicked me in the face. He stomped on my chest, my stomach. I tried to grab Jimmy’s shoe but he kept kicking. My balls felt like they had crawled up inside me. Something in my side cracked. Mr. Harris, above me trying to reach for Jimmy. Rick Mertzer and Mark Sales pulled Jimmy back. My limbs flailed on their own accord. I was on the other side of some Rubicon. I had violated the smallest measurable space that, moments before, had kept me separate from the Grungies. I thought Jimmy would never stop. Or if he did, there wouldn’t be anything to look forward to. Not his humiliation, not my praise, not even the sanctuary of my bedroom.
“Jimmy,” one of them said. “Stop. Oh my god.”
Mr. Harris yelled. Jimmy got one more good kick in before the emergency buzzing sounded from the back exit. I was drifting. There was no comfort ahead. Isaiah and my family and my fantasies all belonged to yesterday. Things went black, and Rick said, “Oh my god, Steven. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” I think by then I was bleeding.
I suppose there’s a threshold for everybody. Even in Rick and Mark’s cruelty, there was only so far they would go. Jimmy’s threshold was in a different place. For Jimmy Bancroft, it was something else entirely.
I know that now, at least. But even if I had known that then, I don’t know if anything would have been different. Maybe it would have been worse.
In high school, before we graduated, went to separate colleges, and never saw each other again, I heard a rumor that Jimmy Bancroft was in jail (I also heard once that he shot himself) and told Isaiah that I felt guilty. He told me not to. No one can really control those things. It wasn’t me, and even if the incident on the bus didn’t happen, something else would have.
“Sometimes you think stuff is your fault,” he said. “Even when it’s not. So you’ve got to forgive yourself, especially when it’s not your fault, because no one else can do it.”
“That’s corny,” I said.
Isaiah had said other things about it, but I can’t remember what they were.
Fakie and Switch
By Tracy Hayes Odena
We were what? Fifteen? Sixteen? Who the hell knows, check it out: Arvin Bender was a power-dork with bad glasses, braces—the whole bit. He hung around us non-stop even though we gave him hell until it got boring. He wore this black trench coat all the time, even in the middle of summer, and it had all these spots on it where it had ripped and someone had tried to save it with Frankenstein stitches. Every Friday he’d sport the same “Get High on Life” T-shirt. He reeked of hot dogs and the cheap evergreen incense his mom sold at the dollar store. The kid was a total misfit. I mean, we were all misfits, but he was like the emperor of the misfits. One look at Bender and you just knew he never outgrew magic tricks. He had a ton of black hair that was half curly, half straight all meshed together in a thick, dark helmet. Sometimes he’d talk in trucker CB lingo. We’d all be sitting around and out of nowhere the dude would say, “I hear ya good buddy. I feel your 10-20” and then he’d wink at you and you’d have no idea what just happened so you’d fake a coughing fit, or pretend to tie your shoe just to un-queer the energy. He carried this black book bag with a sci-fi patch on it. It was some picture of a wizard looking into a crystal ball or some crap. He called the bag a “satchel,” and it looked like something a hobbit would carry. It was jammed full with notebooks and drawings. I mean the guy could draw; I have to give him that. What I’m saying is that he didn’t exactly score a lot with the chicks.
The first time I saw him he was walking down the main hill at the reservoir. The Rez was the only place we could skate without the cops hounding us. If they did come around, all the hills made it easy to ditch them if you had enough warning. At the top of the Rez was a huge grassy field but the sides and bottom were all concrete, a skateboarder’s dream.
Lee’s older brother would buy a case of Coors for us on the weekends if we floated him some extra cash, and we’d hide the beer in the sludge-green water. Every day after school we’d blast The Circle Jerks and fly through the air as we cranked out ollies and nollies and ghetto birds. Sometimes on the weekends we even slept there.
The day we met Bender I’d been watching Peterson trying to do a no-comply 180 when Bender walked right out in front of him so that he totally bailed—just sent the board flying. Peterson landed on his face and practically had sparks shooting off of his teeth. His skateboard missed Bender’s head by a millimeter. Bender picked up the board all cool, like skateboards had been almost decapitating him his whole life. He walked up to Peterson and held it out. Peterson yanked it out of his hands, but before he could say anything, Bender turned around, walked to the bottom of a hill, popped a squat and started drawing. After that stunt it was obvious the kid wasn’t going anywhere.
* * *
I’m not pointing fingers or anything but if anyone was to blame for the whole Bender thing it was the girls. I didn’t even know the half of it until the night it went down. Hell, I still have questions. I do know that if Teena and Jules hadn’t pretended to like him, he never would’ve stuck around. They’d flirt with him like crazy just to watch him squirm. It was a game. Most of us guys just ignored him. The girls made it seem like they couldn’t get enough of him. They’d sit and pose for his drawings—fluffing their hair, looking serious, looking sexy, looking stupid. When he’d hand them the picture they’d be all, “Wow, I bet you’ll be a famous artist some day,” and all this crap. The punk vibe of the Rez had turned into a sixth grade girls’ slumber party. No shit, we half expected “Light as Feather, Stiff as a Board” to bust out any minute. This one day Hamster’s all, “Why is he here? He doesn’t even skate.” (Hamster had these beady little eyes and was kind of round, the name just stuck.)
So I said, “Yeh, but he makes us look cooler, right?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “The girls sure seem to think he’s the shit.” He jerked his head over to what had become “their spot.”
I turned around to see Teena running her fingers through Bender’s hair like they were auditioning for a goddamn shampoo commercial. She laughed when one of her skull rings got caught in his mop. Jules was re-stringing her Docs with neon green laces. She looks up at the two of them and goes, “You guys are so cute together.” Bender turned like forty shades of red and bolted home.
For a fake-out it looked pretty damn real. I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. I mean, Teena was smokin’ hot. She had white-blond hair down to her ass and huge green eyes that could stop you cold if you could see them through all the black shit she caked on. She was more hippie than punk with these shirts as long as dresses. She just had this cool vibe. What I mean is that she had her pick of any guy in the world. Did Bender actually believe she’d choose him?
As far as Jules, she wasn’t technically my girlfriend, but we did fool around an awful lot. I pictured double dates and crap and got pissed off. When I asked Jules about it later, she totally denied that Teena really had something for Bender. She blew it off completely: “As if.”
This crap went on for weeks. I didn’t catch a lot of it because Peterson had built a new half-pipe at the Rez and we were busy breaking it in. I’d been trying to teach Hamster how to do a boneless and the kid just wasn’t getting it.
“Dude,” I said. “Grab the board with your trailing hand—grab the inside rail, use your lead foot to jump, crank a 180 and land with both feet back on the board.”
Total dead stare. I mean trying to teach those guys something worked my last nerve, but I wanted them to get it. Most of the guys had never touched a skateboard before they met me. I can safely say I showed every guy at the Rez and I mean EVERY guy there the most basic stuff, like how to ride fakie and switch. Not to brag, but these dudes looked up to me. Some of them got really good—like Mark Gonzales good—and could’ve gone pro but instead they went to college or moved out of the neighborhood to get old somewhere else.
&
nbsp; Here’s the thing: I don’t know if the dance plan was Jules’s idea or Teena’s, I just know it wasn’t mine. They thought it would be hilarious to have Teena ask Bender to go to Homecoming. I didn’t want to be involved from the word go. I knew the dance would be lame and I wasn’t going to go whether Bender was going or not. Jules kept telling me how kickass it would be but I held my ground. She started bitching about how all we do is sit around a stupid cesspool and watch dudes fall on the ground. It was like all of a sudden we were thirty years old and married and I had to listen to this crap. She said she was done with the Rez. I told her no one had a gun to her head and she stormed off and didn’t come back for a week. When she finally showed up again, she handed me two homecoming tickets. They were little blue books with these cheesy sailboats on the front. Under the boat it said, “Come Away With Me.” I told her no way. Straight up. The thing is she knew I’d never go, so why’d she buy them? Because it was all part of the plan, that’s why. I made some lame joke about putting a canoe in the Rez water and she had a hissy and walked over to Bender and Teena and chucked the tickets at them. I scoped Bender as he looked at the tickets. He started getting all methy and weirded-out and then Teena leaned over and whispered something in his ear.
I might’ve razzed him a little about the dance. It was a long time ago. I can’t remember every single, solitary detail. If I did say anything it was only to help him out. You know, so he didn’t get his hopes up about Teena.
* * *
The night of the dance Jules told me she saw Teena’s sister at Kmart and she told her Teena was in lockdown at her parents’ house because they busted her trying to sneak out the night before. I figured if she was grounded, she wasn’t going to the dance with Bender, but I didn’t bring it up because I didn’t want Jules to start in again, begging me to go. Plus, it was really none of my damn business what those two did. Like I said, they just hung out at the same places I did.
We were pounding Coors and skating and Jules was flipping through an old copy of Thrasher, all pissy and bored. Peterson got up and started doing this killer imitation of a jock dancing at Homecoming, kicking his skinny legs from side to side, snapping his fingers. He looked like a half-crazed rooster, clucking his mohawk to the beat. He started singing, “Wake Me Up, Before You Go-Go,” at the top of his lungs. Then, as if someone had flipped a switch, the night became surreal.
We saw the lights from the bottom of the hill. They lit up the suburban sky like a giant disco ball spinning and streaming. Within a minute they were on us. Jules dumped out the beer in the grass and dudes booked in all directions. I saw Hamster jet, hiding his face with his board, his Vision Streetwear stickers reflecting back at me, Converse going mach ten. Jules whipped a pack of gum at me and ran off into the weeds. Somehow it was understood that I was going to do all the talking. I popped some gum in my mouth and just stood there. I had no reason to run. I wasn’t guilty of anything. They put their spotlight on me and I was as good as blind. So I stood there and tried to figure out what the hell was going on. I remember I actually heard her before I saw her. Her screams—howling like a goddamn battle cry—echoed and slid off all the cement around us.
It was Bender’s mom.
She was barefoot in a purple nightgown. She waved her arms above her head and gasped for air in between words. “This is your fault! All of you!” and the cops tried to put her back in the car but she wasn’t having any of it. She screamed, “His blood is on your hands!” and I wondered who the hell beat up Bender, and why they assumed it was me when the cop took out his megaphone and said, “We see you, Finkel. We just want to talk to you.”
I tried to walk all casual up to them. Bender’s mom stared at me with these wild eyes and her chest huffing. Then she lunged at me and pulled me down to the ground by my hair. By my hair. Then this other cop grabbed her around her waist and shoved her into the back of the squad car. The other cop—the name on his badge said Brady—he led me behind the car.
“There’s been an incident,” Brady whispered to me. More like hissed at me, if you want to know the truth. I heard Bender’s mom screaming in the car, she’d turned around to face me and was banging on the glass, pointing at me through the back window. I did a quick scan of the Rez and it was a cemetery. No one. Everything started to go in slow-mo and it was all still except for Bender’s mom shaking the car, twisting and turning around in her seat, trying to have another go at me.
“Do you know Arvin Bender?” Brady asked me, shining his Maglight in my face. That was pretty over the top—the Maglight—I mean the whole place looked like it was lit up with a thousand pop-flashes from an old Polaroid.
“Sort of,” I said. “I mean he hangs around.”
Then Brady looked at the car and back to me and whispered, “Well, tonight Arvin was hanging around from a rope in his bedroom. You know anything about that?”
I stood there until I felt Brady’s hands clamp down around my neck. He steered me toward Bender’s mom. I felt my shoes inch into the dirt in a slow trudge to the car. It felt like the walls of the Rez were sliding, shifting back and forth, and I could barely keep my balance. Bender’s mom was hugging the seat in front of her, bawling, her electrocuted curls shaking in her shadow. The police radio kicked out static messages that seeped through the windows and the whole Rez was frozen-still around me, wet grass and crickets amplified like they had a Marshall stack, and I put my hand on the door but couldn’t force myself to get into the car or even look at her, the whole time thinking I’d trade places with Bender in a flippin’ heartbeat.
Amanda’s Garden
By Eliza Horn
He hacked and pounded his chest, trying to release the seed from his throat. He leaned over and his eyes watered. Finally, he swallowed it. “You know they have seedless watermelon,” he said to her without looking at her.
They were sitting on her apartment’s balcony, overlooking a cracking ocean of pavement and parked cars. “That shit is unnatural,” Amanda said. She spat a seed between her lips and over the railing.
He was annoyed that she wouldn’t even consider it, but she wasn’t his girlfriend, so he guessed she didn’t owe him that much. The rules for fuck buddies were always ambiguous, which was why it worked for him. She was damn hot though, sitting there with her legs spread and her feet on the rail. “You want to go inside?”
“Nah,” she said, wrapping those cherry lips, red and full and soft, around the edge of the melon, biting and chewing and swallowing, and then spitting seeds into the lot.
“Why did you tell me to come over then?” he said, not believing her, but knowing that this was sometimes the game he had to play. She’d pretend she didn’t want it because she was so tired of being alone. She said she felt alone even when he was with her and she hated it. She didn’t want him to pay for dinner or take her to nice hotels or wrap a ring around her finger, she only wanted to share stories about how he got the scar next to his eye or her scar under her chin and talk about how shitty their parents were and how screwed up their last relationships had been, which was why they both got sucked into this in the first place because his girlfriend got hooked on coke and her boyfriend was just looking for a mother, and how they should appreciate each other as each other with all their scars and bruises and failures. He would tell her that what they had now was all he could give and that he was messed up and that he wouldn’t care if she found someone else. If she really wanted all of those things—making breakfast in bed, cuddling at night, tracing each other’s freckles and whatnot—she should be looking for someone else. Then he’d threaten to leave. Sometimes she’d let him get as far as the hall before she’d come after him, wrap her arms about him and say I want you to stay.
She spat another seed over the balcony. She fell back against the lawn hair and her red hair, wavy and tangled, reached her pointed shoulders.
“You know,” he said, “that’s gross. Can’t you just swallow them?”
She wrapped her lips around the edge of t
he slice. A droplet of juice dribbled down her chin. He wanted to lean over and lick it away but the back of her hand got to it before he even moved.
“Well,” she said, “maybe one of them will drop in one of those cracks and it’ll rain and it’ll start to grow and before you know it there’ll be baby watermelons growing in the parking lot.” The muscles in her tan legs tensed as she leaned over to spit another one, and then relaxed as she leaned back. She tugged her cut-off jean shorts so they covered a few more centimeters of her thigh.
“Is that why you buy seeded watermelon?” he asked. He took another bite, his teeth scraping the rind. “Why do you got to make everything so complicated?” A seed lodged itself between his teeth. “Goddamn it.” He stuck his finger in to free it. He dropped his remaining watermelon slice down beside him. The rind cracked in two, staining her white balcony floor with pink droplets. “Okay, I’m tired. Let’s go inside.”
“No,” she said, still facing the parking lot, tracing the railing with her big toe.
He stood up. “You want to plant your watermelon garden?”
“Maybe,” she said.
He laughed and glared down at her. “You know that’s like a one in a million chance?”
She looked up at him for the first time that day. Her eyes sometimes had caramel flecks that he only noticed when he was staring at her intensely, like when he was above her, feeling her belly moving in and out right before she came. Her head would angle back, her body still for a moment before her toes would curl towards the soles of her feet. And then she would close her eyes and smile. He would kiss her eyelids, then to her lips, her neck, to each breast, and then to her heart so he could feel the rush of blood that he had inspired.
He turned and opened the door from the balcony back into her apartment. “Ready?”
She shook her head and stared back into the parking lot. Her legs dropped from the railing and her knees curled underneath her chin. Then she leaned her head back towards the dimming sky. “I need something that I can sink my teeth into.”