Paranoid Park (8 page)

In math I didn’t have my assignment. I hadn’t done it, hadn’t looked at it. Mr. Minter got kinda pissed. I had an A in math up till then.

At lunch I sat with my friends Parker and James. They talked about some Japanese horror movie they had seen. I didn’t say anything. Then, as I ate, tears suddenly came into my eyes. The veggie burger I was eating turned to mush in my mouth. I felt so sad and so exhausted. Everything was like a terrible dream I kept waiting to wake up from. But I never did.

Parker and James took off, and I ended up eating by myself. I looked down the table and saw Macy McLaughlin. She was with some other sophomores. They looked so young to me, sitting there, gabbing about whatever. Macy turned in my direction and I quickly looked down into my food. But I thought about her: I remembered how she followed me around in sixth grade. She was really outgoing back then. She would follow me on her bike, pestering me, asking me endless questions. She wasn’t like that now. She stayed with her cool friends. I thought about that for, like, twenty seconds-which I was grateful for. That was twenty seconds I wasn’t seeing that security guard lying in the tracks.

After fifth period, I walked by Jennifer’s locker. She had first lunch that day, so I hadn’t seen her. She was on her cell phone, and she kept flipping her hair. When she finished talking, she didn’t look to me. She bent down to get something out of the bottom of her locker. “So did you and Jared have fun on Saturday?” she asked.

I slipped my hands in my pockets. “Not really.”

“What did you guys do?” she asked.

“Nothing. Just... hung out....”

“You should have come with us. We went to Elizabeth’s house and went swimming.”

I nodded.

“But I guess that doesn’t really interest you very much,” she said. “I guess skating with Jared is more fun.”

“I already told him I would.”

That was the weird thing about Jennifer. She could be a little hard on you sometimes. But then she would turn around and be nice again.

“What are you doing after school?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“We could do something if you want.”

“Okay,” I said.

After school, I got my books and walked behind the cafeteria to meet Jennifer. Jared was skating with Christian Barlow and Paul Auster in the parking lot. They were the other two serious skaters at our school, besides Jared. They practiced kick-flips, ollies. I watched for a minute.

“Where’s your board?” asked Jared, coming over.

“Left it at home.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“I dunno,” I said.

“What are you doing now?”

“Hanging out with Jennifer.”

Behind him, Paul Auster landed a kick-flip. Christian tried one but couldn’t land it. Jared pushed across the parking lot and tried one, too, but he fell on his ass.

Jennifer and I went to her house. No one was home, and we went upstairs to her bedroom. She seemed really excited about something, and when we got in her room she shut the door and jumped on her bed.

“So guess what happened to Petra?” she asked, bouncing on the bed. Petra was one of her friends.

“What?”

“She did it! With Mike Paley! They did it, like, three times last weekend.”

“Wow,” I said. Petra and Mike Paley had only been going out for a couple weeks.

“Do you think that’s too soon?” she asked, still bouncing.

“I don’t know,” I said. I sat in her chair and looked at the stuff on her desk.

“I think it is,” gushed Jennifer. “Kinda. But maybe not. Nobody really knows about it yet. She hasn’t told that many people. But still. Can you believe that? Petra and Mike! And Maddy did it last summer. It’s, like, totally happening to all my friends!”

Jennifer jumped up from her bed and went to her closet. She stood in front of a long mirror inside the door and brushed her hair. She had beautiful long blonde hair.

I watched her. I breathed a low sigh. I could still feel that ache in my chest. It was always there. No matter what else was happening.

“So now everyone’s asking
me,”
said Jennifer seriously.

“Yeah?”

“They want to know when I will. And if I want it to be with you.”

I swallowed. “What do you tell them?”

“I say I don’t know. I barely even know if you want to be my boyfriend.” She held her hair and brushed it. “I mean, if you’d rather go skateboarding than hang out with me ...”

“I told you—” I said, but I felt dizzy all of a sudden. My head swam. I felt choked in by the overstuffed room, the frilly comforter, the stuffed animals. It was too hot in there. It felt like the heat was on full blast.

Jennifer went back to the bed and sat down. “Don’t you want to sit on the bed?” she asked, a huge grin on her face. “It’s more comfortable.”

I left the chair and sat on the bed. She was right, it was more comfortable. She grinned and scooted closer. She kissed me once on the lips. But when she felt my neck she stopped. “You feel hot,” she said. “Are you okay?”

“I think so.”

“You’re not sick, are you?” said Jennifer. “I have cheerleader tryouts; I can’t get sick.”

“I’m okay,” I said. But I felt weak. I wanted to lie down. I scooted farther onto her bed and lay on my back.

Jennifer looked thoughtfully at my body. “I mean for me, deciding who’s your first, it’s more about trust.” She bounced on the bed. “And, like, if you know the person isn’t going to run around talking about it, like it’s this big conquest—”

The room spun a whole circle. I thought I was going to throw up. I sat up suddenly.

“Are you okay?” said Jennifer, alarmed.

“Sorry, I just feel dizzy.”

She put her hand on my forehead. “You feel really hot. Maybe you have a fever.”

“No, I just haven’t slept. I’m just tired.”

“Here, lie back,” she said. A look of genuine concern came over her face. She lay back with me. She scooted close and began stroking my hair and my forehead. It felt nice. I closed my eyes.

We lay like that for a long time. Whatever was happening stopped, and I felt better. Then she kissed my cheek, and my temple, and the side of my head. Then she got up and turned the light down.

She lay next to me. She ran her hands across my chest and unbuttoned the front of my shirt. She crawled on top of me and we started making out. It got pretty intense, but then I started to freak out again. I felt vulnerable and exposed, like someone might be looking for me, someone might be tracking me down.

I sat up suddenly.

“What?” she said. “Now what’s wrong?”

“Nothing, I just... I gotta go.”

She was losing her patience. “Do you not want to be my first?” she asked.

“No... I just... I don’t know....”

She got up. She crawled off the bed and ran into her bathroom and slammed the door. I heard the water turn on.

I sat on the bed for a moment. But I didn’t want to stay in that house any longer. I couldn’t take this. Not now.

I found my Vans, which I had kicked off. I put my shirt back on and straightened my pants. I looked at myself in her mirror. I looked terrible. I looked totally guilty.

I went to the bathroom door. “Jennifer?” I said, tapping the door slightly with my knuckle.

“What?!”
she said. She sounded very upset.

“I think I might be sick. Or have a fever or something. We can talk about this later. I’m just not myself today.”

“I wish I could believe you.”

“You gotta believe me. I swear.”

“Why can’t you at least talk to me? God, you’re the worst boyfriend ever!”

I was in no condition to argue. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m gonna go. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I left her room and found my way out the front door. Usually I skated home from her house. But I had no skateboard, so that day I walked.

Back at my house, I began thinking about confession. I had never been, but I had seen it on TV. And my dad was Catholic. He never went to church or anything, but I thought maybe since he was, that would make me qualified to go.

The main thing was, at confession, you could tell the priest the worst thing you ever did, and they couldn’t tell anyone. They didn’t see your face, so they didn’t even know your identity. You were completely safe. And then afterward, the priest told you some things to do, like help the poor or whatever, and then you were forgiven and you felt better.

And also, then God would know you were really sorry, which would be good. There was just one problem: I didn’t know if I believed in God. Like when I cried in Jared’s mom’s shower, I felt like I was talking to God. But when I actually thought about it, I didn’t know what I believed. My parents didn’t do religious stuff. Like, my dad said he believed in God, but then he would joke and say you might as well because if he didn’t exist you were screwed anyway.

So I didn’t know. But I thought confession would be good. I needed to tell someone. And it was at least one thing I could do while I tried to figure out my options. And maybe you could talk to the priest about it. Maybe you could ask him for advice.

That night, I ate dinner with my little brother Henry. I watched him read a graphic novel from the library, but he kept spilling milk on it. That was the thing. People did bad things all the time. They wrecked library books. They cheated in school. They beat up the nerdy kids.

I tried to eat. I had hardly eaten anything since Saturday. I still thought constantly about calling the police. I had this daydream of walking into a police station and turning myself in. How dramatic it would be. Everyone would say how brave and honest I was. And of course they would be totally nice to me, like in the movies. The kindly old sergeant would get me a Coke and sit me down with the lady counselor who would say, “It’s completely normal that you were afraid to tell us. That’s what usually happens in cases like this-the person comes in days later. Don’t worry, you did the right thing-it was an accident. That security guard endangered your life. We have lots of reports of him harassing innocent skateboarders like yourself....”

At the same time, I had another dream, a nightmare really, of being bullied and pushed around, of hard adult faces turning on you like they do. Male faces, turning ugly and grabbing you and handcuffing you and not telling the truth about things. And then some politician using you: telling everyone how evil teenagers were, skateboarders especially, and they had to be stopped! We’re going to make you an example! That stuff happened, too. I had seen it. Every skateboarder had.

After dinner in my room, I Googled “confession.” The first thing that came up was an article about a priest in Minnesota who turned a child molester in to the police, after he confessed. It was a big controversy and all these other people had written comments about whether the priest should have told or not. Most people said he should have. Most people agreed that child molesting was worse than breaking the pact of the confessional. But other people thought that anything a person confessed, even murder, was protected no matter what. You weren’t even talking to the priest, they believed—you were talking to God. The priest was just a stand-in.