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(THREE:: the lost is found)
When I get to school the next morning, Delilah glances up at me and then back down quickly, trying not to laugh. I must look worse than I thought. Ah well. Still alive. That’s all that matters. Pants, boxers, shirt, shoes, hair, heartbeat, still breathing.
Yeah, I’m good.
“Hey, little boy. How was your walk—” she snickers, “—to school, um, this morning?”
“The best twenty minutes of my life!” Filled with the neighbor’s dog pissing on my leg, almost getting clipped by a dickhead on a motorcycle and forgetting to zip up my book bag all the way; there’s probably a paper trail from my house to Maple Avenue, where I finally realized why people were trying to get my attention. Good hair day? No. Nice clothes? Try again. Publishers Clearing House winner? I wish. Old tests falling in the gutter? Ding, ding, you won a prize.
Delilah pauses mid-combination, eyes narrowing and brow wrinkling. That’s a bad look for her. She makes a show of smelling in my general direction. “…Why do you smell like the bathroom?”
“Oh what, are you serious!” It doesn’t come out much like a question, but only because I’m so surprised. I thought it’d worn off around mile two! “You can smell it?”
“Wait,” and right before my eyes, her face ages twenty years. She leans back like I’m contagious, “No way! You mean it’s, like, pee or something? Did you fall in?” But I can see her starting to smile, just a lightness around the corners of her eyes so far.
“Yeah, Dee. I fell in the toilet.”
Delilah snorts, biting her lip.
Shooting her a nonplussed look, I slide my hat off before a teacher can come by and confiscate it, shrugging off what I’m about to say, even as I say it, “My neighbors don’t keep their dogs on leashes.”
She snorts again, and it turns into a real laugh that she almost chokes on when it comes out.
“Oh, yuck it up.” It’s funny. If I were her, I’d be amused too. But that still doesn’t mean I appreciate it, being on the receiving end.
I shrug my bag off my shoulder and backtrack down to my locker to put my stuff up. I’m still not sure why I take her abuse. I should find a friend who will get all weepy and supportive and compliantly truck my pants off to a Laundromat somewhere, instead of heehawing about it.
She sticks her tongue through her teeth and her laugh rushes after me down the hallway; and man, is she loud. Her laugh is so hard and so strong, it‘s like that whole girly giggle thing girls do doesn‘t apply to her. It‘s like she leveled up when she was twelve and never looked back. And people always stare when she does it. “So—so what, one of them used you—instead of a hydrant?”
And the fifteen people walking in the hallway just heard that. I bang the side of my face into my locker— harder than I intended. “Ah, fuck…” This is completely ass, man.
She clears her throat, testing the water. “Not a good day, huh?”
“It‘s not my favorite.”
“Well…” Delilah pries her books out of her locker and then slaps it shut, wandering up to me. “We can go chill at Cheesy Chuus this afternoon. My treat. Anything you want.”
“Yeah?” The promise of double cheese with triple bell peppers makes my heart all light and happy.
Oh, yeah.
Sure.
But it does go straight to my stomach, and the pee smell isn’t so strong anymore. I’ll take it.
“Yeah, sure. But one thing, little boy—”
I curl my lip and finish for her, “Yes, mom, I’ll change my clothes before we go.”
Folks, this is what our society is all about.
Like any other day, I try to sit as far in the back as possible because it’s Computer Sciences — aka ‘The Dumbshit Class’ — and Mr. Waters never does anything in it but tell us stories about his brilliant son and give us worksheets (worksheets in a computer course… Yeah, do that math.) I’d hate the class if it weren’t for the fact that Mr. Waters likes me enough to overlook my logging on to the internet and watching videos most of the period. I figure that I’m one less person he has to worry about failing and having to see again, and I guess I’d be pretty happy about that, too, if I were him. So he cuts me some slack.
Besides, it’s an easy A.
I jerk my mouse around on the mouse pad, force the computer to wake up and flash me the password box. Out of the corner of my eye, worksheets rapidly change hands, and when they finally get to me, the girl who gives them to me makes a sad face, lips long and dragging down her chin. That’s nothing new, people looking at me like I’m something to be ashamed of, so I just take the pile of worksheets and pass them over to the guy next to me. Sam Freudman.
He’s a fifth year senior, and that alone should’ve earned him enough ridicule to last both first and second semester and then some; but no one ever says anything about it because he’s a pretty big dude, and after the first month of the school year, most of the other seniors had either realized how lame it was or just how bad a nosebleed they’d get, if he heard them bashing him.
No one looks at him like he’s something to be ashamed of; and I’m pretty comfortable with myself, but sometimes I envy him for that. The ‘sometimes’ when I let high school society get to me.
Like now. Surprisingly, walking around with dog pee on your pants is uncool. Must’ve missed the memo on that one. I guess you really do learn something new every day.
The worksheets circulate farther down the row, and Sam leans over into my computer space, straining his eyes up at the news video I’m playing on my screen. “You smell like piss, man.” He’s real quiet about it, too, almost a whisper, and I kind of want to ask him if he was born yesterday.
“Yeah,” I mutter. “Bad day.”
“You piss yourself?”
“No. Dog.”
“Oh,” he says, like he knows exactly how it is. Maybe he does. I’m pretty sure his style of intimidation would scare the shit out of a dog, if it even looked at him.
“You should go to the office and get some clean pants from the lost and found.”
And he might get a lot of flack for being a fifth year senior, but Sam’s a pretty smart guy.
All the same, I find it hard to believe someone could really lose their pants. But I’m desperate.
“Hello, Rudy,” Mrs…Gradyson, I think, starts. Who am I to talk? I can’t even get her name right. “What can I do for you today?”
I wander up to her desk and hope it does something to block her nose from the smell. “Maybe this is a dumb question, but do you guys have any pants or shorts in the lost and found?” And when I flick my eyes down, just a casual look away so that I’m not staring at her, I can see her name plate: Marcia Grayson. I was close.
She glances over at her computer and then back up at me. “Yes, a few. We clean out the gym lockers every semester, and sometimes people leave things.”
“Oh really?”
“Yes. It‘s not high fashion or anything, but—” she gets up and turns around to heft open a drawer in the file cabinet, “—come around and see if anything’ll work.”
I pretty much already know my choices: some parachute pants from the nineties, pink sweats with the word ‘Hottie’ on the ass, bicycle shorts, a girl’s hot pants, and old bellbottoms that haven’t been worn since the seventies. If there’s actually anything normal in there, I might really piss my pants. Just out of shock.
It wouldn’t be a real lost and found if the stuff were actually worth finding.
So let’s see. I offhandedly hear Mrs. Grayson sit back down; her chair wheezes out a sigh of air. Oh, wow, Care Bear pajama pants.
“Honey,” she says behind me, clicking back and forth in the chair. Must be a slow day; there haven’t been any fights yet, at least. “Can I ask why you need new pants?”
“A dog pis—” I catch my tongue on the word ‘pissed’ because, huh, apparently I have some manners. News to me. “…A dog urinated on me this morning.”
Old red boxers.
Sexy.
“One time, when I was a little girl, my dog Bernard peed on me. Oh, it was so dreadful at the time…”
Skull t-shirt, #1 Angel Girl shirt. Faded Dairy Queen hat. That’s kind of cool, actually.
“My mother laughed so hard at me all day. After she cleaned me up and got me changed, of course.”
“I think my dad would have laughed at me, too.” Gray navy sweatpants— hey, oh fuck yes!
Mrs. Grayson stops moving around long enough to watch me pull the sweats out of the cabinet.
Which are missing half a leg on one side, but I’ll take them over the Care Bear jams.
“Parents never change.”
“I guess not.”
To my surprise, Mrs. Grayson abruptly grabs the one leg of the pants and starts to even it out with a pair of scissors she must’ve had somewhere on her desk. “There we go. Good as gold.” She smiles. “Unless you wanted to look like that LL fellow.”
What is LL Cool J doing now, anyway? “Uh, no. No, thanks.”
“You can go and change in the faculty bathroom, so you aren’t late to class.”
“Thank you.” Hey, score. Privileges.
Mr. Dreamboat Lawrence, or, as Delilah code names him, “Trigonometry,” because we were in Trigonometry the first time she saw him, and she’s had a crush on him since the ninth grade; I’m pretty sure he has one on her, too, but due to outside circumstances, they’ve never gone out.
Outside circumstances being the fact that Lawrence is one of Meka’s friends, however far removed, and Dee has some weird loyalty kick. Not to mention she doesn’t like Meka either, and sometimes, she goes to even farther lengths to avoid him than I do.
Besides, Lawrence is a shy bastard. He always looks down at the floor when he turns to talk to her, quiet and nice; she thinks it’s the cutest thing ever in the world, oh, Rudy, did you see him today in Calculus? He was so cute! But I wish he’d just fucking grow a pair already. He’s giving a bad name to the male species.
Right. Alongside me, the guy dogs piss on, and Meka, the guy who curses people, the male species is pure gold.
Not to mention I don’t think her parents really want her dating a white guy.
“Dee, stop.” I drop my bag on the floor. “Stop, or you’ll make his head spontaneously combust.”
Delilah cringes, “Shut up.” She reaches over and smacks my shoulder.
Lawrence turns around. He always turns around. It’s like the teacher should just come and stand behind us to teach, Lawrence is faced away from the chalkboard so much.
“He bothering you already, Delilah?”
She smiles lazily. That’s Dee. Always in control on the outside, having a meltdown on the inside. Like some snack cake. “Yeah.”
I can see why she likes him, though. For all his unattractive wussiness, he’s got bright, blonde hair and black eyes and freckles that look like they get shellacked on every morning. I guess he dresses well, too, because Dee constantly talks about how sexy he looks in every shirt he owns. I don’t really care enough to notice. He’s straight. That’s it, the end.
“Fuck, Lawrence. Protect me from her,” I remark, unzipping my bag and lugging my calculus book out of my backpack.
Lawrence chuckles and says something, but it’s muffled by the appearance of Meka walking stiff and nonchalant down his row, toward the empty seat in front of Lawrence.
Delilah giggles – I amend myself about her not giggling because she does do it around Lawrence — and talks back, and I normally tune them out anyway, just because Dee recounts the whole conversation later on. No use hearing it twice.
I hunch over to shuffle around the papers jammed in my Calculus book, searching for last night’s homework, absently listening to the ‘whah, whah, whah’ of Delilah and Lawrence’s back-and-forth. I pull out a piece of paper that turns out to be one of the homeworks for last week and get a little residually disappointed. I really gotta get organized one of these days.
“Hey, Meka, can I see your answer for number fifteen?”
I think it’s a little fucked up that I get jealous when people ask Meka for his answers instead of me for mine, but it’s like a knee-jerk reaction. Sneering, I shove the dumb thought to the back of my mind because I won’t have any answers to not give, if I can’t find my homework. I thought I put it in the front of my book.
“You made a mistake there,” Meka’s voice monotones its way into my head. Where the hell is my homework?
“Oh, right, okay,” then there’s the squeal of an eraser and eraser shavings being swept back onto my desk – thanks for that, Patrice – and I start rifling through my papers all over again. Maybe I missed it. There’s no way I forgot it. I’ve never forgotten my homework before.
“What about your number twenty? I think I got that wrong, too…”
“Here,” and I flick my eyes up a second to see Meka make a motion for Patrice to hand her paper to him. “I’ll fix it.” And I maybe keep looking at him a few more seconds longer than I should.
There’s something else that makes Meka stand out for me, more than just him being valedictorian or cursing me or stringing random colored beads in his hair, which he does.
He gives off vibes.
Gay vibes. As if the beads don’t tip anyone off. I’ve heard him say that his little sister likes to do hair, and it’d hurt her feelings too much if he took them out, but she’s, I don’t know, thirteen now, and it’s time for her to come back down to Earth. He can’t pull them off. That’s about as much fashion sense as I have, but I know that beads in the hair is a phenomenon very few can successfully work out, without looking like a douche.
I think he does them himself. I bet he sings along with the My Little Pony theme song and beads his hair every morning.
I burst out laughing at that, so hard I slap my desk, so hard eventually no noise comes out, just a wheeze of air and my mouth gaped open so wide anyone could count all my teeth. And he, Patrice, Dee and Lawrence all turn to stare at me in unison.
Ah, screw you guys, too. Can’t have a little laugh without people popping a vein.
“Sorry,” I just say, turning back to my papers. Any other time, Delilah would have been all over that, asking me what was funny, so that she could laugh too. But she’s in Lawrence Land, a place of Care Bears and unicorns and no return. Oh well. I’ll tell her later. Good mental images need to be shared.
“What about twenty-two?” Patrice adds quietly.
There are rumors that Meka’s got a fucking full-on crush on Jean Torez, the head cheerleader, and that he‘s tried asking her out a million times already. People say they have some weird ‘playing hard to get’ routine going on; but I think it’s all bullshit to protect his reputation. Whatever that is, exactly. He’s a nerd just like me, a weird guy in general, but I guess that he has some place in the social ladder that he doesn’t want to jeopardize.
Honestly though, as weird to me as he is now, there was one time, in freshmen year, before any of us really got to know each other, where I had a— maybe it was a crush on him.
I’d been in his homeroom, separated from Dee, sitting next to one of my other would-be friends, Henry, and he’d walked in, shorter and bonier than me, with curly black hair and the same subtle vibes he still has now. I already knew I was gay by then, and it’d been outright comforting to think someone else was, too, even if it was just my rookie mistake. A gay freshman, just like me. And he was Middle Eastern, too. I’d stupidly thought we‘d be friends, if only because we could both bitch about how crazy our families are.
But we got in different groups, and then the whole grade point average competition started, and by sophomore year, that was all we were to each other. And then he had a massive growth spurt and grew out all of his hair and started doing weird stuff like putting beads in it and only wearing gray and getting piercings, and a lot of people thought he was a straight-up weird fuck, but Dee and I just thought he was taking everyone for a ride. Or cracking under pressure.
I’d hoped he was cracking under pressure.
This week, all his beads are green. He used to get beaten up for having them, but now I think that people just sort of leave him alone about it. That’s the only reason why I’d actually believe that his sister really does them. Getting beaten up as much as he did, he probably would have dropped them completely, if they didn’t mean something to someone.
And besides that, they look like a five-year-old did them. His sister’s not five, but thirteen’s closer to it than eighteen.
“Where’d you get the shorts, Rudy?”
I look over at Dee slowly. Must’ve zoned out a little. “Shorts…? Oh, the lost and found.”
She leans toward Lawrence, smirking, “Some dog peed on him this morning.”
“Really?” He laughs hard for a good ten seconds and then swipes a hand in the air, quick back and forth, trying to erase something, “Sorry, sorry, Rudy.”
You sure sound it, man.
“That’s just—wow.”
“You know, Dee, I still have my piss pants. I could throw them in both your faces.”
She rolls her eyes, “Please. Like you’d do that with Mr. Santos in the room.”
“I didn’t say I’d do it right now.”
Her mouth tightens in a straight line.
I toss the thought of telling her about the curse around in my head, but I still don’t think that anything really happened, so it’s no use bringing it up unless we want a good laugh; but, knowing her, she’d probably get all serious about it and try to curse him back.
Not that it wouldn’t be sick if she could, but magic isn’t real; and for some reason, every time I say that to myself in my head, it comes out in my dad’s voice.
From the passenger seat of Dee’s car, I watch her throw her backpack in the trunk and then circle around to the driver’s side, where she stops for a second. She yells something down the lot at someone, yells again, laughing, and raises her arm to do something – what exactly gets cut off by the top of the car— before she opens the door and sinks down into her seat.
“Lawrence?”
She shakes her head. “Henry wanted to know where we were going.”
“Is he coming, too?”
“No. He said he had to go and see his girl.”
“Man.” Ever since Henry went and got a college girlfriend, he’s skipped out on everything. “He went and got a life without us.”
“Whatever. Our life is awesome. Not everyone has time to go to Cheesy Chuu’s.” She turns the key in the ignition, jangling all her key chains. “Would you rather be at football practice or chilling with all the pizza you could want?”
“Good point.” And I have to yell it over again – good point! — because her radio comes on too loud, some country station that I didn’t know she listened to, and she reaches over quick to twist the volume knob all the way to mute. I slide my back pack down on the floor in between my feet, kicking into it and resituating it enough that it can’t jam any sharp book corners into my ankles. “So your mom got you new tires?”
“Yeah. Sorry,” she says sort of sheepishly, shifting the car in gear. “And this time, she actually didn’t give me a speech on responsibility.”
“That’s gotta count for something.”
“I wish. She’ll just make the next speech extra long.” As she moves to slowly wheel out of the space, she has to honk the horn a few times because some of the seniors won’t get off their asses long enough to step out of the way. She cusses, but it’s low, under her breath, and I offhandedly wonder if that’s a habit that’s grown from living with someone like her mother. Cussing so that no one can really hear you do it. Clearly, I don’t have that sort of self-control, but it’s nice to know that someone around here does.
Gliding us out of the parking lot, Dee taps her fingers against the steering wheel. Nervous tendency, even when no music’s around to keep rhythm with. She always does it. I don’t know why. “How’d your last period go?”
I shrug. “Good. Same old, same old. Yours?”
“Ted and Jonathan did their presentation today. I really think I’m gonna to miss them when we graduate. They had no idea what they were talking about, but they were so convincing anyway. It was hilarious.”
“Really? What was their project about?”
“I don’t even know, but you should’ve heard the stuff they said.” She switches on her left turn signal, and I pick at the suction cup dog on my window, peeling off one of its legs and then sticking it back to the glass, peeling off its arm, staring at its curly tail, pretty entertained as it begins to melt backward off the window. Fascinating. It’s amazing shit like this can actually amusing people. “Things about drinking tile cleaner and licking shoes and…just, they’re crazy.”
I nod, winding my eyes up to stare at the store signs as they clip by the edge of the windshield. It’s kind of weird to live in a place and see it change, but never really notice until it’s already completely different. Or until you realize that there are two McDonald’s right across the street from each other and wonder, hey, why do they need two so close together? I suppose that going off to college means I’ll come back and everything will have changed even more, and it won’t feel like home, not like it does now; but that might just be a layover anxiety from all the college movies I’ve seen in my life.
“Did you miss the rain yesterday?”
“Nope.” My word follows Dee pushing the ‘1’ on her sound system and turning the volume up a few notches. “I got soaked. I came in and all my dad’s friend, colleagues – whatever the fuck he calls them – were sitting at the table.”
We pull up to a red light, and Delilah shifts her legs on the pedals. “I bet you were embarrassing as always, too.”
“Well, when it’s funny, it’s funny.” But then I walked into the kitchen and ran into Stiff Shirts McGee. “He’s got a new assistant.”
“Some hot young thing he’s gonna marry and make your wicked step-mom, right?”
I picture Seth in a dress, polka dots, big pink bow, the works, and smirk. “No. It’s a guy.”
“A guy?” I see the very end of her eyebrow raising, like those four words were some promise of money or cake or a million more Beast book bags, enough to fill a pool and swim in. “And?”
“He’s all right.” If I tell her what I really think, what I thought yesterday, standing there practically popping a boner at him, she’ll go all girly on me and get me excited about it when I shouldn’t be. He’s older than me and not really what I’d go for, anyway, despite how he looks. It’d be like dating a really hot piece of wood. Sure, we could have fun. But where’s the substance? “He was really professional and anal.”
“Is he gay?”
I grimace. “I don’t have that good of a gaydar. Geez, I only met him for two minutes.”
Dee reaches over and tries to smack my cheek, but I block her hand; she keeps trying, and we end up having an arm wrestling match as she maneuvers into Cheesy Chuu’s parking lot. This, I pause, would really be a sucky way to die. “Okay. Okay,” I grab her wrist and push it over toward her side of the car, hoping she might put it back on the wheel and not get us killed. “Okay. I thought it was possible… But it was a pretty vague possibility.” And maybe it was just some blind hope confusing me.
And I shift to look at her, and her smile’s practically talking for her, it’s so wide. Make that two million Beast book bags.
“You’re such a girl,” I comment. “Hey, want to go pick out China patterns or plan my wedding shower now or something?!” I flatten my palms on my face and shoot her my best ‘eager puppy’ expression, stupid and wanting to change the subject.
She rolls her eyes. “Smart aleck.” And then, when she’s put the car in park, she adds, “Like anyone’d want to marry you anyway.”
I really like writing this story. So…ah, I don’t know why it took me this long to get motivated enough to finish the chapter. I’m sorry, guys. But hey, chapter four’s already started, so New Year’s Resolution #1: finish a story. Preferably this one. Hopefully somebody's still reading.
And Happy New Year’s Eve/Day!
