Mysterious Skin (6 page)

Grade five lumbered in. Neil stood at the back of the line. For the first half of the process, the principal, Mr. Fili, separated boys from girls. The boys left, and Miss Timmons dimmed the lights. The room felt stifling, as if some killer had snuck in to poison our air with a noxious nerve gas. I rested my elbows on my desk; planted my chin on my fists.

Miss Timmons hesitated before reading the film’s captions. “Sometimes, at this age, young men will want to touch certain places on a young lady’s body.” She bit her lip like the section of an orange.

When the filmstrip was over, Miss Timmons handed out free Kotex pads. Most girls popped theirs into purses or the back shadows of desk drawers. I examined mine. It resembled something I would hold over a campfire or take a chomp from.

After ten minutes, the boys returned. “Find a seat, men, somewhere on the floor,” Mr. Fili told them. “This time, try to keep quiet. If you feel the urge to make some capricious outburst, please hold your breath. And no commentaries. This is serious stuff.” When he said that, he scowled at Neil.

Neil moved toward me, as if following a dotted line to my desk. I swallowed hard. He sat, his knee touching my calf.

Part two of the birds-and-bees rigamarole was special: a film instead of filmstrip. Kids oohed and aahed when they heard the projector’s buzzes and clicks. Perhaps this meant we would see real, live sex action.

Some fool of a filmmaker had dreamed up the idea that humor was the best way to teach sex. Tiny cartoon sperm wriggled and roller coastered toward a bulging, rouged egg. The egg licked its lips, as eager and lewd as an old whore. The music—
The 1812 Overture
—swelled, and the quickest and most virile sperm punctured the egg. “Bull’s-eye!” the voice-over cackled.

Some kids clapped and cheered. “Shhh,” said Miss Timmons.

Neil looked up at me. I swore I could smell bologna on him. A smear of ketchup had dried on his shirt front. He smiled, and I smiled back. He mouthed the words, “This is total bullshit,” moving to lean against my legs. When he shifted, I felt his backbone move. No one was watching us.

On screen, drawings of a penis and the inside of a vagina flashed on and off. A couple of fifth graders giggled. Penis entered vagina, and white junk gushed forth like mist from a geyser. More giggles. Miss Timmons shhed again.

“Ridiculous,” Neil whispered. “Not everyone fucks like that.” Some kids heard him, glared and sneered. “Some people take it up the ass.” One girl’s face reddened, as if scratched.

As the credits rolled, Neil’s hand rested on my sneaker, resulting in a goose bumpy feeling that lasted three tiny seconds. I wiggled my toes. Lights clicked on, and his hand moved away. “Let’s go, fifth grade,” Mr. Fili said.

“How fucked up,” Neil said to me. He was speaking to no one else now. “Why don’t they teach us something we don’t already know?” Disappointment amended his face.

Neil waved as they filed out. Kids’ heads turned to stare
at me, and I felt as though it were Neil and me versus everyone else. It was a good feeling. I let my classmates gawk awhile, then shook my middle finger at them.

That evening, I upped the volume on the stereo to drown out the TV my parents and brother were fixed in front of. Even with the bedroom door closed, I could hear televised trumpets blaring “America the Beautiful.” A newscaster said, “Happy Columbus Day.” I lifted the needle from my Blondie album and started side one over again: “Dreaming,” my favorite song.

My geography book toppled off my bed. I was just beginning to effectively imagine myself as a singer onstage, a cluster of punks bouncing below me, when Mom rapped at the door. “Can you hear in there?” she asked. “You’ll shake the house off its foundation. Anyway, you’ve got a phone call. It’s some boy.”

I ran to the kitchen’s extension. Mom had just finished drying dishes, and her set of knives lined a black towel on the table. By that time in the fall, it was starting to grow dark by six o’clock, so the room looked like some kind of torture dungeon. I left the light off.

The music on the phone’s other end sounded cool. I listened for three, four, five seconds. “This is Wendy.”

Someone stuttered a hello. Then, “You might not know me. My name’s Stephen Zepherelli.”

My eyes widened. Everyone knew the notorious Stephen Zepherelli. He attended class in the adjoining building at school, one of the Learning Disabilities trio we occasionally saw delivering messages to Mr. Fili or bending over water faucets in the hall. The LDs, we called them. Stephen Zepherelli was the most severe of the three LDs. He wasn’t retarded, but he was close. He drooled, and he smelled like an old pond.

Then I realized the absurdity of him calling me. I’d heard Zepherelli’s voice before, and this wasn’t it. “Okay,” I said. “Not funny. Someone’s got to have at least half a brain to know how to dial a telephone. Who is this really?”

A laugh. The new-wave song paused, then began blasting a guitar solo. “Hey Wendy, this is Neil McCormick.” I couldn’t believe it. “I’ve called three Petersons in the phone book already, and I finally found the right one. What are you doing?”

I forgave Neil for the Zepherelli joke. “Nothing,” I said. “As usual. How about that film today?”

We chatted for ten minutes about people we despised most at school. While Neil spoke, I handled the knives, arranging them on the table from longest to shortest. “I’d like to stab all those fools,” I said, my back turned from the direction of the den and my parents. “Make it hurt. Stab them in the gut, then twist the knife real slow. I’ve read it really hurts that way. Or I’d cut their heads right off.”

When I said that, Neil laughed. I pictured him throwing his head back, his mouth open, his teeth gleaming like an animal’s.

By Halloween I stopped riding the bus home and began walking with Neil. His house was only four blocks from mine. Sometimes we carried each other’s books. We tried alternate ways home. Once we even went the opposite direction, heading toward the prison on Hutchinson’s east side. Neil stood at its gate, his shoelaces clotted with sandburs, breathing in the wistful smells of the rain-soaked hay and mud, the raked piles of leaves. “Kansas State Industrial Reformatory,” he read. “Maybe I’ll end up here someday.” A guard watched us from the stone tower. We waved, but he didn’t wave back.

Neil lived with his mother, and had no bratty brothers
or sisters to deal with. And his father wasn’t a hypnotist at all. He was dead. “Killed in a war,” Neil said. “He’s nothing but a corpse now. I know him from one picture, and one picture only. He looks nothing like me, either. What should I care about the guy?”

Mrs. McCormick drank gin straight from the bottle. On the label, a bearded man was dressed in a plaid skirt. The first time I visited Neil’s, his mom slid the bottle aside and took my hand in hers. “Hello, Wendy,” she said. “It’s not often I see a friend of Neil’s. And such vibrant blond hair.” Her own hair was as black as her son’s. She had pinned it back with green pickle-shaped barrettes.

A bookshelf in Neil’s house was piled with paperbacks with damaged or missing covers. Neil explained that his mother had a job at a grocery store, and her boss allowed her to keep whatever books the customers vandalized. Many concerned true kidnappings and murders. Mrs. McCormick saw me eyeing them. “You can borrow whatever you like,” she told me. Soon I stopped reading about the tedious exploits of that ignoramus Nancy Drew. Within days I knew all there was to know about Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, two teenage fugitives who blazed a trail of murder and mayhem across the Midwest a few decades ago. They weren’t that much older than Neil and me. They even hailed from Nebraska, our border state. In two grainy mug shots, their grimaces couldn’t have been more severe if their mouths had been clogged with thumbtacks. If I thought hard enough, Neil and I almost resembled them.

I had decided that ’83 would be my last year as a trick-or-treater, and I wanted to dress as something special. I considered a gypsy, a freshly murdered corpse, an evil nun with a knife beneath her habit. Then I decided Neil and I should go as Charles and Caril. On Halloween night, I stared at the criminals’ pictures and tried to change my looks.

Neil stretched out on his bed. “It’s not working,” he said. He tossed a baseball into the air, caught it. “No one will get it, so why bother?”

I wiped the lipstick on a Kleenex and watched him watching me in his bedroom mirror. When I peeled off the fake eyelash, my lid made a popping noise.

Mrs. McCormick dragged two spider costumes from her closet. She and a date, Neil claimed, had gone as “Daddy and Mommy Longlegs” to a party last year. “She lost that boyfriend around the same time,” he said. “Sometimes she can’t handle anything. But she’s my mom.”

We mascaraed circles around our eyes and thumbed black blobs across our mouths. Before we left the house, Neil gave me three yellow pills. “Swallow these.” The box in his hand read
DOZ-AWAY
. I wasn’t sure if that meant we’d grow sleepy or stay perky, but the box’s cover pictured a pair of wide-awake eyes.

By that point I would have done anything Neil told me. I popped the pills in my mouth, swallowing without water.

Neil handed me the telephone beside his bed. He told me to call my parents and claim his mom would be escorting us. When I lied to Mom, it didn’t feel so scandalous. “I’ll take Kurt around the neighborhood without you, then,” she said. “Call back when you want me to drive over and get you. Don’t stay out too late, and remember what I told you about those perverts who prey on kids on Halloween.” She laughed nervously. I thought of her stories of razor blades wedged into apples, stories that never ceased to thrill me.

Two hours came and went. We wandered around Hutchinson as spiders, our extra four legs bobbing at our sides. The rows of our eyes gleamed from our headpieces. The shadows we cast gave me the creeps, so we shied away from streetlights. Neil hissed when doors opened. One wrinkly lady touched my nose with a counterfeit black fin
gernail. She asked, “Aren’t you two a little old for this?” Still, our shopping bags filled to the top. I stomped a Granny Smith into mush on the sidewalk. No hidden razor.

Neil traded his Bit-O-Honeys for anything I had with peanuts. “I’m allergic to nuts,” I said. That was a lie, but I wanted to make him happy.

At Twenty-third and Adams, a group of seven kids walked toward us. I recognized the younger ones from school under their guises of pirate, fat lady, and something that resembled a beaver. “Hey, it’s you-know-who from school,” Neil said, and pointed to a green dragon in the crowd’s center.

I couldn’t tell who it was. “It’s that retardo,” Neil told me. He was right. Even under the tied-on snout and green pointy ears, I could make out Stephen Zepherelli.

“Hey,” Neil said. Their heads turned. “Hey, snotnoses, where’re your parents?”

The beaver-thing pointed west. “Back there,” it said. The words garbled behind its fake buck teeth.

Zepherelli smiled. The dragon snout shifted on his face. He carried a plastic pumpkin, chock-full with candy. “Let’s kidnap him,” Neil said to me.

I’d witnessed Neil’s damage to Robert P. and Alastair. Now, some dire section of my brain longed to find out what twisted things Neil could do to this nimrod, this Stephen Zepherelli. Neil checked the sidewalk for adults. When none materialized, he grabbed the kid’s left hand. “He’s supposed to come with us,” Neil said to the rest of the trick-or-treaters. “His mom said so. She doesn’t want him out too late.”

Zepherelli whined at first, but Neil said we were leading him to a house that was giving away “enough candy for three thousand starving kids.” Zepherelli didn’t seem to mind the kidnapping after that. We stood on each side of
him, gripped his scrawny wrists, and pulled him along. Mahogany-colored leaves spun around our rushing feet. “Slow down,” he said at one point. We just moved faster. He stopped once to retrieve a handful of candy corn from his plastic pumpkin, and once to find a Zero candy bar. His painted-on dragon’s teeth shone under street lamps, as white as piano keys.

We arrived at Neil’s. “Is this the house with the candy?” Zepherelli asked. He rummaged through his pumpkin, making room.

“Good guess.”

Neil’s mom snoozed on the living room couch. Nearly every light in the house had been left on. Neil pushed Zepherelli toward me. “Hold this little bastard while I’m gone.” He trotted from room to room, flicking switches. In seconds, darkness had lowered around us. Neil slid aside a record by a band called Bow Wow Wow and slipped another LP on the turntable. Scary sound effects drifted through the house at a volume soft enough to keep his mom sleeping. On the record, a cat hissed, chains rattled, crazed banshees wailed.

“Neat,” Zepherelli said. His snout showed a smudge of white chocolate from the Zero. He nibbled the tip from a piece of candy corn.

I heard Neil pissing. I suddenly felt embarrassed, standing there with our victim. Neil returned, carrying a flashlight and a paper sack. He opened the latter. Inside were firecrackers and bottle rockets. “Left over from Fourth of July,” Neil said. He winked. “Let’s take him out behind the house.”

The McCormick backyard consisted of overgrown weeds, an apricot tree, and a dilapidated slippery slide-swing set. Behind the swings was a cement-filled hole someone had once meant for a cellar. We walked toward it. The rotten
apricot odor permeated the autumn air. Stars glittered in the sky. Down the block, kids yelled “trick or treat” from a doorstep.

Neil pushed Zepherelli toward the stretch of cement. “Lie on your back,” he said.

The yellow pills had done something to me. My skin tingled like I’d taken a bath in ice. I was a hundred percent awake, and prepared for anything. I adjusted a loose arm and stood above the victim; Neil spilled the bag’s contents onto the cement. “Bottle rockets,” the dragon said, as if they were hundred-dollar bills. I could smell Zepherelli’s breath, even over all those apricots.

Neil told him to shut up. He pulled off the dragon’s snout. The string snapped against Zepherelli’s face. “Ouch.”

I watched as Neil took three bottle rockets and placed their wooden ends in Zepherelli’s mouth. He pinched Zepherelli’s lips shut. He moved briskly, as if he’d done it all a thousand times. Then he straddled the kid. I remembered that seance, Robert P.’s still face. Stephen Zepherelli’s resembled it. It looked drugged, almost as if it really were hypnotized. It didn’t register any emotion. Its cheeks had been smeared with green makeup. Its eyes were cold and blank, not unlike the peeled grapes we had passed around during the inane Haunted Hall setup at school that day. “These are the dead man’s eyes,” Miss Timmons had told us in her best Vincent Price voice.