Every Visible Thing, page 9
“Stop,” he says again, but Danny ignores him, moving faster. And then Owen realizes he doesn’t want Danny to stop, he wants everything else to stop—the world, his brain—so that the feeling of falling into dangerous ecstasy never ever ends. He clenches his fist around cold hard metal and knows without looking that it is Danny’s father’s gun.
More than one thing happens that has never happened before. Owen seizes up and bends uncontrollably at his middle, half sitting as the unbearable arc explodes, and just as Danny pulls his mouth away Owen comes, emptying himself with a cry somewhere between relief and horror, the tears in his eyes blurring the figure in the doorway. It is Danny’s mother, still in her coat, arms akimbo, lit from behind by the hallway’s bare bulb, looking like a jaded, faux-fur winged angel there to tell them about the end of the world.
7. white dress
The first day I go to school after cutting my hair off is a disaster. Even though my mother’s hairdresser softened the edges, and I wear a headband to girl it down, I still get stares in class. In the lunchroom, I pass by girls from my grammar school and one of them sings out: “Nice haircut,” sending the whole table into hysterics. By the time I leave the lunchroom, I have thought up a bunch of comebacks—nice nose, nice zit, nice excuse for a brain—but I never remember these when I need them. Girls insult me, and I blush and smile pathetically as if apologizing for myself. Long after they’ve forgotten all about it I’m still fuming, and it’s hard to say who I hate more—me or them.
In Geometry, Tracy widens her eyes. “Interesting color choice,” she says, as Mr. Herman hands out quiz papers.
“It was an accident,” I say. She raises an eyebrow at this. “Did you study?” I whisper. Mr. Herman announces we’ll get automatic zeros if we say another word, and Tracy waves me away.
I get a zero anyway. I don’t understand any of the four problems, so I flip the quiz over and record the time, minute by minute, until the bell rings and we are set free.
The only person who compliments me is Jonah. In Photography, where I’m printing photos from another roll of Hugh’s film. This one was taken at a concert, multiple shots of a band on a small stage, punk kids dancing in a frenzy, dark pockets revealed by the glare of Hugh’s flash. A few photos of corners, one guy sitting on a dirty floor with his head in his hands, another homeless man wrapped like a mummy in an alley next to a marquee. Hugh liked to take pictures of sad, solitary people, which I find strange, since he was never one of them.
“Do you have a fake ID?” Jonah says. He startles me, and I drop my tongs and have to dip my fingers in chemicals to retrieve them.
“Just wondering how you got into the Rat,” he says, pointing to the photo with the marquee. I vaguely recognize it as a club in Kenmore Square, rotting black clapboard and no windows.
“Are you stalking me?” I say. It’s funny how I can always think of rude things to say to Jonah, but he never gets insulted by them.
“Your hair looks nice like that,” he says. This is so obviously a lie, I laugh out loud. I’m looking right at him and it’s like I can see my laugh sort of bouncing around in his eyes.
He seems very proud of this, even after I go back to scowling.
I get sent to the social worker after failing my geometry test. I’ve never been here before and the office is really cluttered—scratched-up leather couches, student art and photographs and dreamcatchers tacked up next to posters about drugs and date rape. There are two counselors—one for boys and one for girls. The girl one is a huge middle-aged woman with too much hair and jewelry and hippie clothes. She tells me to call her Patty, then asks if I want to talk about anything. I don’t.
“High school can be hard,” she says, flipping through a file on her messy desk. “Especially if you’re having trouble at home.”
“It’s not that hard,” I say. She must think I’m stupid.
“I didn’t mean academically,” she says, smiling in an annoying way, like she’s so sincere.
“Did your family get any therapy?” she says then. “After losing Hugh?”
“No,” I say, kind of mortified at the thought of this—my family stuck in an office like this one, expected to speak to one another. Patty nods like she knows everything.
“Mr. Allen says you’re doing well in photography lab,” she says. I shrug. “Try putting a little more effort into your other classes, okay? You got all As last year.” I shrug again.
“You can come talk any time you feel overwhelmed,” she says.
“Did my brother ever come here?” I say.
“A couple of times,” she says. She closes the file. I know that tone. She’s not going to tell me any more.
For the first two weeks I only go to Cambridge after school. I change quickly at home; transforming into a boy goes faster than trying to make myself look like a girl in the mornings. I find Sebastian in the Pit, often in casual, low-toned conversation with someone, exchanging money and tiny packages in the time it takes to blink. I look for Lionel, who has shown up in more of Hugh’s photos, but he never appears while I’m there. His last visits, usually right after I leave or before I arrive, are spoken about like sightings of a rock star.
Sebastian takes me with him into Harvard Yard, where we are buzzed into dorms and climb metal stairways, knock on the doors of students who are never fully dressed. They answer in their underwear or maroon bathrobes, the closet-sized rooms behind them darkened by blankets tacked over the windows. They invite us in, give Sebastian cash, and take whatever interests them from his backpack. Inside it’s like a salesman’s briefcase, with pills, papers, powders, and leaves, all organized into tiny plastic jewelry bags or rolled into the larger Baggies meant for peanut butter sandwiches. Sometimes the college kid, especially if his friends are around, will invite us to do a line of coke or share the first joint. Sebastian almost always accepts, and after one dorm visit he is so high he has to take a break in the Pit, resting his head in the lap of one of the many girls who fawn over him. I haven’t taken anything from Sebastian’s backpack, which is pretty ironic. I’ve never done drugs and I’m practically a drug dealer.
I think about Hugh while we sell drugs. I wonder if this is what Hugh was doing with Lionel. If he smoked from bongs with the ease and confidence of someone not afraid to lose himself. If he was murdered because he was an informant, or owed so much money for drugs he ran away to avoid the mob. If he hadn’t disappeared, would he be in one of these dorm rooms, and would he smile when he saw me, or scowl at the intrusion?
When we’re not at Harvard, or in the Pit, when Sebastian gets too cold or wet or bored, he takes me to people’s houses. In the streets behind Harvard Square, beyond brick sidewalks and ancient trees, are massive houses he strolls in and out of as if they are his own. There is rarely anyone home, but Sebastian always finds a back door open, a window cracked, a key hidden under a moss-covered pot. He punches numbers into alarm pads, resetting them when we leave. After a dozen, I stop asking him if the houses are his. They never are.
We raid refrigerators, linger with magazines in spotless bathrooms, turn stereo knobs up to ten. In family rooms—something I always wanted as a kid, a second living room where you keep the TV—we lounge on sectional couches and play Nintendo or watch General Hospital while Sebastian explains the plot lines to me. During Donohue, Sebastian usually falls asleep, and I wander around whatever house we’re in, looking at their photographs. One child getting older in a straight line up the stairs, or badly focused vacation shots perched on pianos and mantelpieces. Some only have photos of holidays, everyone dressed up and an inch or two taller than the year before, boys and girls in birthday hats blowing out candles on brightly frosted cakes. Some people care about photos, you can tell by the print quality and mounting, and others, with no thought of the future, pierce them with tacks to corkboards in the kitchen. A few houses have no pictures displayed at all, and I have to go looking for them, in shoe boxes on bookshelves, in albums tucked under coffee tables. It’s like their memories are something they take out only when they’re ready, like they don’t want to round a corner and come face-to-face with themselves, ten years younger and clueless. I flip through these albums and watch people change. Children grow bigger, get awkward, settle into their faces. Parents get old, until they barely resemble the way they looked in the washed-out, square photos from twenty years ago. I used to think once you turned eighteen, that’s what you would look like for the rest of your life. The truth is, you just keep changing, just when you think you’ve gotten used to your face. Pictures show you what you’ve changed into, ruining the image in your head.
In one house we visit a few times, in the photos crowding every available surface in mismatched frames, one girl goes missing. She is there until the age of ten, thin and pale with gaps in her teeth, and then she is gone, and her younger brother and older sister keep growing without her. Christmases and beach houses and school plays continue to be recorded, she is simply not there. I think she died. If she’d disappeared, if they were still waiting for her, unwilling to let time go on until they knew for sure, they would have stopped taking pictures. Like my parents. They always let Hugh be the family photographer, but they never bothered to take on the job after he was gone. The only pictures we have for the last five years are the ones taken in school. The office always sends home samples, even if your parents refuse to order any prints.
I’ve stolen some of these other families’ photos. Badly focused Polaroids half-buried on a bulletin board, doubles from a CVS envelope shoved in a desk drawer. The ones no one will miss. At first I compare them to Hugh’s photos, looking for the kids he knew who might have lived here, who would now be in college or working full-time. No one is familiar, but I keep them anyway. I put them in the plastic pages of my binder: a family of four at Disneyland, a velvet-clad toddler screaming on Santa’s lap, two children next to a massive sand castle, the older brother with his arm wrapped in mock threat around his sister’s delicate neck.
Not all of the houses are empty, sometimes we visit kids my age or a little older who Sebastian knows. They hang out in their basement rec rooms, with wall-to-wall carpet and pool tables, built-in shelves that hold board games and videotapes, stereo systems with speakers the size of small children. These rooms are like playhouses the parents build so their kids will stay home and out of trouble. In stead, this is where they smoke pot, drink gin straight from the bottle, place little tabs of paper printed with moons and stars to dissolve on their tongues. Often parents call on the phone, and the kids have to get themselves up off the couch, putting their hallucinations on hold while they go preheat the oven or take chicken thighs out to defrost.
Though they’re obviously rich, these kids all look like Sebastian, holes wearing through the elbows and knees of their clothes, hair unwashed, the soles of their combat boots peeling off their heels. The rich girls in my grammar school all had closets full of clothes, a rainbow of sock colors to match their sweaters. But these kids, mostly boys, wear the same thing day after day, even though they can clearly afford whatever they want. They give their money to Sebastian instead.
One day starts out warm but gets chilly in the afternoon. I have on only a T-shirt and Hugh’s leather jacket, and as we’re leaving a house at dusk it is starting to snow. Our host goes into the hall closet and takes out two dry-cleaning bags. They are ankle-length men’s wool coats with Brooks Brothers labels, one gray, one black.
“Keep them,” he says, as we rip through the plastic and remove the paper-lined hangers. “My dad will never notice.”
When I start skipping school, it’s not to go to Cambridge. In the beginning I miss my classes to hang out in the Quad, just a hallway or a stairwell away from my former life as a high school girl.
It’s Sebastian’s idea. He’s been to my school already, selling joints and acid and Ecstasy. He asks me to meet him there one morning, and after everyone leaves my house, I walk to school as a boy, my spiked hair freezing solid in the wind. In the Quad, Sebastian introduces me to people I have been watching for more than a year. Boys who never glanced in my direction nod respectfully and offer me cigarettes, New School girls who would normally turn up their noses smile and flip their hair. One group of sophomore girls with tight braids sprouting from their half-shaved heads whisper and stare at me and call Sebastian over. When he comes back, he puts a brotherly arm around my shoulders.
“Apparently you’re gorgeous,” he says. I avoid them for the rest of the morning. Later I look at myself in the mirror in the girl’s room, which I sneak into when the halls are deserted, to see if they’re right. I see only what I’ve seen my whole life, my face. A face nobody huddled and whispered about when it belonged to a girl.
The Quad’s rhythm follows the daily class schedule. In the ten minutes before every hour it is crowded with students passing through on their way to their next class, stopping to suck down a cigarette or two before the bell rings. At the end of these waves comes a tense limbo, when students decide whether to trudge off to class or hang back and miss it altogether. The people with free blocks put pressure on those with classes. Some kids torture themselves out loud. I haven’t been to physics in a week. Do you think he’ll give me a do-over, ’cause if I take the test today I’ll flunk. They beg for excuses and their friends dole them out like cigarettes. The more experienced delinquents are nonchalant. Their friends head off to class and they wave at them absentmindedly, as if school is a hobby they’ve grown bored with. If asked what class they’re skipping, half the time they don’t even know. Sebastian is an easy convincer. After a visit from him most kids are too stoned and paranoid to make it to History or Oceanography.
For me, that first day is torture. At every bell I picture whatever class I’m supposed to be in, my chair glaringly empty, teachers asking what has happened to me. The urge to run at the sound of the bell is so great, Sebastian has to stop me a few times. At one point I worry out loud about missing my vocab quiz, and he laughs.
“Go if you want,” he says, but he knows I can’t. Who would I say I was?
As the day goes by, the sun moving across the stones of the Quad, I miss one class after another and nothing happens. No one comes out to look for me. By afternoon I half believe I am no longer expected anywhere. I have stepped outside of it all as cleanly as Sebastian.
Just before the last period, I watch Tracy march through the Quad. I am sitting on a low, wide stone step with three boys, all of whom are playing with fire, setting matches or lighters to the frayed edges of their clothing, pinching out the flames when they approach bare skin. She doesn’t even glance at me—I am the sort of boy she naturally avoids—but I know she is walking through the Quad hoping to see me. She would go by the hall otherwise. One of the boys makes a whinnying noise and another snorts in encouragement. She is wearing one of her horse-barn Tshirts. I am glad she doesn’t seem to hear them, and that she has no idea who I am when I grin in appreciation of their insult.
I spend the last period wishing I could show up just for Photography. That I had a spare girl outfit in my locker. Or that I could be invisible, that I could move through the darkroom developing Hugh’s pictures without anyone asking me who the hell I think I am.
The next roll I develop is of Hugh’s Confirmation and my First Communion, which happened on the same day. Hugh is in a suit jacket slightly short in the wrists, I’m in a white eyelet dress with a satin sash, my hair yanked into pearl barrettes. We’re posed in front of the church, in our front yard by the lilac tree, with our parents, Owen, our grandparents, and a few of my father’s colleagues from BC. Hugh looks happy—that’s the day my grandparents gave him the Leica—and I look furious. While arguing with my mother that morning about wearing the dress, Hugh had passed by the open door of my room and said: “It wouldn’t kill you to look like a girl for once.” He spent the whole day taking himself too seriously. My grandmother asked if he’d had the calling yet, and he put on a thoughtful expression, and said he wasn’t sure. I wanted to tell them all he was full of it, that he had no more plans to be a priest than to be Miss America. But they wouldn’t have listened to me.
Later, after the party guests had gone home, and I had changed back into my uniform of worn corduroys and Little League T-shirt, Hugh came by my room. I’d set up a fort with the dining room chairs and king-sized sheets. Inside I had a fan, a bowl of leftover Easter candy, and a pile of Roald Dahl books. Hugh had taught me how to make this fort, but he rarely joined me anymore. That day, he took photos of me eating a Cadbury cream egg and lounging on pillows.
“I’m supposed to be a man now,” he said. “According to the church.” I looked at him and squinted, trying to see a difference. He seemed to get taller every day, but no older—he was just stretching up. His nose looked a little bigger, maybe. But it wasn’t like he had a mustache or anything. I remember wondering if what they meant about becoming a man had something to do with his soul instead.
“Are you one?” I said.
He shrugged. “I feel old,” he said. He was thirteen. He would start high school that fall. “But not like a man.”
At the time, I nodded, pretending I knew what he meant, though really I had no idea. I was just glad he was in my room.
On the Friday before we’re let off for Christmas, with the promise of midterms I am unprepared for looming ahead in January, I’m sitting in an almost abandoned Quad when it starts to snow. Huge quiet flakes that build up fast, layering white on the wrinkled arms of Hugh’s jacket. I’m waiting for Sebastian, who has gone off with a New School girl. I assumed it was a drug deal, but they’ve been gone so long I’m starting to wonder if they’re hooking up. This possibility makes me blush harder than is really attractive for a boy. Luckily, the cold is a camouflage. The girl’s friend is with me, waiting for them to get back. She has terrible posture; she hunches her shoulders and hides her face in her hair. She keeps glancing up expectantly at me. She’s not as pretty as her friend but clearly has an even bigger crush on Sebastian. When he’s around she doesn’t talk but gazes at him from beneath her hair, eyes wide with the fear of rejection. He hasn’t noticed her. It’s because I know exactly what she’s waiting for that I do what I do next. I huddle with her like we’re the only two people in the world, dragging the flint of my lighter back and forth across her denim-covered notebook. I make us each a sparkly cigarette and we smoke them while watching each other, our eyelashes collecting the snow. I am both embarrassed and triumphant at how delighted she seems, at how she starts and giggles at every spark, and how she smiles up at me as if I’ve given her something worthy of worship. I had no idea how easy it was to impress a girl.
