Blackbird (5 page)

“I don’t know whats the matter,” it read, “but Id realy like to help.”

Have I mentioned that Cherie is just about the worst English student who ever lived? Consistent D’s on her tests, hasn’t a clue about punctuation. Not that she’s stupid, mind you; she simply has no written-language skills.

“Anything I can do Ill do,” the letter continued. Cherie’s particularly bad with apostrophes. “Just tell me what I can do.”

Then came the part that really killed me:

“I offer you my love,” it said, and the handwriting seemed to get even more jumpy than usual as she wrote, “I offer you my body, if that be your need.”

That’s when I knew I had to tell her.

I got myself to her English class early, and placed the letter on her desk. I had corrected the spelling and punctuation, and written on the bottom, “We have to talk.”

When I told her, her face took on a very sad look, but just for a moment. “Are you sure?” she said. She sighed a little and said, “Just my luck, huh?” Than she took my arm like she always did, almost as if nothing at all had happened. And the subject very seldom came up again.

“Excited about the auditions?” Cherie asked.

“I haven’t got a chance,” I said – it was becoming a reflex.

“Don’t say that,” she said, her voice almost raising to ordinary conversational volume.

“All right, I won’t say that.” I raised a surrendering hand. “I sure would love to get my teeth into that Romeo and Juliet scene, though.”

The only thing in
Hooray for Love
that was even worth the bother was the first-act curtain scene, which was the balcony scene from
Romeo
and Juliet
. I’ve always like the play, loved the Zeffirelli movie, and I would have given both my chest hairs to play that scene. “Unfortunately, that would be about the last thing they’d let me do here.”

“You don’t know that.” Cherie was about to really give me a talking to, I think, when Skipper came in – carrying his guitar, natch. In this town, everybody and his dog has a guitar; even I have one. As Skipper entered, Cherie squeezed my arm a little harder, almost a reflex.

Skipper was wearing this ancient plaid wool shirt that he wears nearly every day of his life – it has this Playboy-bunny patch sewn to the left shoulder. He had his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, the shirt completely unbuttoned, with a tank top underneath. And I wanted to kiss his neck so bad. He tossed an eyebrow-flash up to where we were sitting and smiled, showing the two slightly over-sized canine teeth that made him look like a friendly vampire whenever he smiled.

“Hey, you guys.” Skipper walked up and sat down just to one side of my feet and opened his guitar case, blissfully oblivious to the fact that it nearly wrecked me to have him so close.

“I woke up this morning with this song in my head, and I can’t get it out,” Skipper announced, ear-tuning his guitar, adjusting a couple of strings. I watched his hands plucking at the guitar strings, and I wanted to kiss his fingertips, stroke the backs of his hands. Funny thing: at one time I thought the worst thing that could happen to me would be if Skipper had decided we couldn’t be friends anymore after I told him. But sometimes it seemed like this had to be worse.

“I need for you to do this song with me,” Skipper said, inclining his head toward me, and sang, “Long ago, a young man sits, and plays his wait-ting game.” His voice was soft and raspy, not really pretty – he’s not a singer. I harmonized on the verses, and on the choruses, I came in on the obligato, the part Joni Mitchell sings on the record.

While we did the song, the room got about as quiet as the choir room ever gets. Even the Foleys stopped dueling. And when we finished, everybody applauded. Skipper smiled that crazy alley-cat smile of his and said, “Awrite!” and slapped me on the leg. And it hurt. Not that he’d hit me hard, of course. But I so wanted him to touch me, I mean
really
touch me. Like he touched Kathleen, when she let him. These slappings and punchings, these just-us-guys sort of touchings that Skipper liked to give me, this was worse than nothing.

“Gotta go.” Skipper quickly repacked his guitar, stood up, and placed the guitar case on the cupboard next to Todd’s. “I just had to do that song,” he said. “See you at the auditions.” And he bounded down the tiers and out the door.

And I thought, Shit, life really sucks sometimes. And I didn’t realize I’d said “shit” out loud, except Cherie said, “What?” And I said, “Oh, nothing.” And Cherie was about to say something when the Foleys came over, looking like Howdy Doody and his twin sister; each with a Fender six-string acoustic guitar hanging from their neck, looking (as always) as if they’d each been
born
with a Fender six-string acoustic guitar hanging from their neck.

And Johnnie Foley says, “Johnnie Ray, let’s do ‘Judy Blue Eyes,’ okay?”

“It’s almost eight,” I said, “I’ve got to get to French.”

“Aw, c’mon,” Janie said in that whiny little voice of hers, “you got plenny a time.” And they kicked into the intro, and we sang.

Johnnie Foley on the bottom, Janie on top, and me in the middle.

We’d gotten almost all the way through when the warning bell rang, and we all lit out for class.

Chapter Two

I pretty much sleepwalked through French; I spent most of the hour just staring out into deep space, thinking about Skipper, imagining reaching under his tank top and stroking his chest, and maintaining a pretty steady erection the whole time. I take to the French language pretty easily, probably because of my French blood; anyway, it’s my easiest class. Madame Fournier loves my accent and, I think, just likes pronouncing my name with all the Frenchiosity at her command (just rolling the “R” all over the place), and for some reason she seems to think I’m the very cat’s ass; so even if she catches me daydreaming (which she has a couple times), she just smiles and says, “Dormezvous, Monsieur Rousseau?”

When I got to the locker room to strip for second-period gym, I was eager for a workout, ready to work off some of the wild, caroming energy that was threatening to render me a blithering idiot before lunch. Gym has been just about my favorite class this year, which is quite an unusual statement for me, since I’m not what you’d call an athletic person. I have no interest whatsoever in team sports, and even less in the way of aptitude. Zip. Basically, I’d sooner be reading a good book.

This year, though, for the first time, they’ve offered a weight-training class (which I’m taking), and as I said, it’s my favorite class. Both because I really like the effect that weight-lifting is having on my body, and because Coach Newcomb, who leads the class, is a total hunkus maximus. Big and blond and built-built-built. I fantasize about him quite a lot.

Anyway, I said my daily prayer at my gym locker that I not get a hard-on, with Danny Corson on one side picking underwear lint out of his foreskin and Joe Cjackowski on the other side bent over tying his shoelaces (he always put his shoes on first). I mean, honestly, every day he stands there, bent way over, in nothing but his finely tailored birthday suit and his tennis shoes, and some days it just seems to take him for
ever
to get those things tied. And me trying to remember my locker combination and maybe even my name, thinking to myself,
Please
don’t get hard. I’ve seen a couple of guys throw rods in the locker room, and believe me, there’s no better way to get yourself razzed right out of school.

I threw myself onto the Universal Gym machine like a man possessed, in the hope that pushing myself to utter exhaustion might have a calming effect. I was doing my leg presses, and I was really into it, grunting on the push-out and clanking the weight stack when they hit bottom; and I must have been making something of a racket, because Coach Newcomb strolls over and says, “Hey, Rousseau – take it easy, huh? You’re gonna hurt somebody.”

Now, we have one of those old-fashioned leg-press machines that you practically lie down in and press the weight stacks straight up. I’d been lifting with my eyes closed, and when I opened them, I found myself staring right up Coach Newcomb’s big legs, up the open legs of his white shorts, where I could see part of his jock. I got so hard so fast my dick nearly got a whiplash.

What I generally do when I throw a rod at an inconvenient moment (which, when you throw as many as I do, can average out to about every other one), what I do is recite the Twenty-third Psalm to myself, very quickly. Usually, by “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies,” I’ve gone down enough to where I can make a relatively graceful exit. So I started, “The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want,” closing my eyes again so as not to see Coach walking away (as the Coach is really something to behold, even from the back and even upside down); and I was okay by the time I got to “Yea, though I walk through the valley …” by which time George Watrous was standing over me saying, “Hey Rousseau, you fallin’ asleep down ’ere or what?”

A workout and a hot shower calmed me down some, but not much. I decided during my usual in-and-quickly-out, keeping-my-eyes-to-myself shower that I was in no shape to deal with Twentieth-Century American History, so I decided not to go.

I wasn’t planning to ditch class, exactly. I am, I think I should mention, what they call here an Honor Scholar. The Honor Scholars program is one of the maybe three things in the whole school that makes any kind of sense. All it means is that if your GPA is three-five or better (I have a three-point-seven-five), they make you a little laminated card with your picture on it, and they pretty much allow you to decide whether or not you need to go to a particular class or not. So if you’ve got some abominable Bio assignment and you feel it would be better for your overall educational life to work on that rather than go to English Lit and talk about
Ethan Frome
for the umpteenth time, the English teacher almost has no moral choice but to let you out of his class. Provided, of course, you don’t start flunking out. It’s a very nice deal as school goes. I mean, it’s not as if you can leave school – ours is a closed, repeat, closed campus – and they don’t particularly want to see you roaming aimlessly through the halls. Strictly speaking, you’re supposed to go to the library or to study hall. But, after all, once you’re there, nobody’s breathing down your neck making sure you’re doing what you said you were going to do. I usually read a novel or something, myself.

So I went down to Mr. Katz’s room and told him I had this grisly English paper that had to get done today, and Katz said okay. Then I bopped on over to the library, flashed my Honor Scholar card, and made for the emptiest table, where Carolann Compton was hunched over some book or other. Carolann is pretty easy to spot, even across a room, since she has a veritable riot of naturally curly hair the color of new pennies. We’re talking serious red hair. She was way over to one side of the table, and I was planning to sit way over to the other end and across from her. I whispered, “Carolann,” so as to ask her if I could share her table – just out of courtesy, of course, not as if she owned it or something – and she didn’t seem to hear me, didn’t look up, didn’t budge.

“Carolann –” I attempted a louder stage whisper. I might as well have been talking to the table.

“Carol. Ann.” I called her full-out, so of course both librarians looked up and glared a hole into me, and every living creature in the room turned to look, and finally Carolann looks up with this groggy, disoriented look on her face, as if I’d just awakened her from a hundred-year sleep, and says, “Oh. Hello, Johnnie Ray.”

Now, a lot of people think of Carolann as a certified space cadet, but I’d always liked her. True, she did come off a little moody sometimes – some days she’d be very quiet and introverted, and other days she’d be smiling and joking and even a little bit foul-mouthed.

And there were times, like this time, when it might take you two or three tries to get her attention, even if you were practically nose to nose with her. But, as I say, I liked her. She was different, and I like different.

“Mind if I sit over here?” I asked, rather wishing I’d just sat down, period.

“What? Oh. No. Go ahead.” She looked back down into her book. Then back up. Her mouth opened as if to speak, and then closed again. And she looked back down into the book. Not the most normal behavior, I guess, but sort of par for the course with Carolann. So I pulled out this short story I’d been working on for Mr.

Galvez’s class. I hadn’t completely lied to Mr. Katz: I did have an English assignment, it just wasn’t due for another four days. This story was based on my experiences with Skipper. I was pretty sure Mr. Galvez would be cool about it – he’s cool about most things. We’d been discussing the concepts of foreshadowing and symbolism in class, so I started out the story with a gray, cloudy morning and a single bird, all by itself on a telephone wire, singing all alone. Which was to symbolize loneliness. I felt like Mr. Galvez would get into it. So I’m just about to get back into writing this story, when suddenly Carolann gets up out of her chair and plants herself right across from me. And she gives out with this loud, obvious “Ahem,” just in case I hadn’t noticed she was there, and says, “Could I talk to you a minute?”

“Sure.” I wasn’t in the most conducive work mood, anyway. And I got the feeling that this was something kind of important. I don’t know why. Just a feeling. Maybe it was the fact that Carolann’s face was so flushed. She has that funny carnation-pink skin like a lot of redheads have, and at this moment her face was so blotchy and red you’d think someone slapped her around a little.

“You’re probably going to think this is really weird,” she said. “But I know you can handle it if you just keep an open mind. In fact, you’re maybe the only person in this whole school I would ever dare talk to about this.”

“About what?” It wasn’t like the Carolann I knew to get this mysterioso about things. Quiet, yes – but never cryptic.

“I need for you to promise me you won’t repeat this.” And I thought, What is this, anyway? Just as I was going to mention how silly this was quickly becoming, she said, “I know this seems silly. Just humor me, okay? Promise.”