Play Me Backwards (27 page)

And I was going to have to tell my parents too. I'd have to tell them everything. About how I hadn't really made any plans for after graduation yet, and about just how far I'd let myself sink. I'd done a great job of keeping up a charade for the last few years, but that was going to have to end.

I could just imagine my mom responding by saying, “Well, I hope you kept the pregnancy test, because we're going to start scrapbooking right now.”

After she killed me, of course.

Even though, now that I thought about it, she was only four or five years older than I was now when she had me. She was out of college by then, though, so there's that.

“Maybe my mom can help me get a real estate license,” I said. “There's good money in real estate.”

“You'd be a
great
Realtor.”

I don't think I'd ever felt more grown-up in my life than I did in that moment. The moment when the idea of being a great Realtor seemed like my fondest hope.

If realty didn't work out, I could probably move to some other city and get a job in the insurance business. I didn't know shit about insurance, but I imagined that in most towns I could just walk into an insurance office, tell them I was from Des Moines, the insurance capital of the world, and be put on payroll right away, no questions asked.

And all through the time we talked about this my phone kept
on buzzing with texts. I didn't check them or anything, but Paige noticed.

“You're popular tonight,” she said.

“Kind of a big night in the Ice Cave,” I said. “Word about that dumb poem in the yearbook got around, and a bunch of people are going to fight to keep it in. Edie and Jill even made T-shirts.”

Paige looked over at me.

“You can't be serious.”

“Sounds like there might be a miniature riot.”

“Just tell me you're not a part of it.”

I didn't say anything for a second, and she started to groan.

“Call it off,” she said. “Get on your phone right now, and call it off.”

“Look,” I said. “All I did was send a few text messages saying what was happening, and then things kind of snowballed. It mostly happened during the test and the dance, when my phone was off. It's too late to stop it.”

“But at least tell me you're not going to be a part of it. You're going to come to the meeting with me, and we're going to say that the yearbook can't go out as is.”

“No,” I said. “I'm for the poem. And I'm going to help.”

“Are you seriously telling me you're planning to lead a riot to fight for the rights of devil worshippers?”

“This isn't about Satanism, it's about freedom of religion,” I said. “Kids wear shirts with stuff about Jesus on them all the time. You can't just be for freedom of your
own
religion.”

“If this is really going to be a riot, it could end up on the news. I don't want the baby to be, like, twelve and looking his parents up
online and finding out that one of them was part of a rally of Satanists.”

“Look,” I said. “When the baby comes, I'll go to church with you every Sunday if you want. I'm going to be the best damned father that baby can have. But if I'm going to be a dad, that means I've got to be a man, and a man stands up.”

I gave
her
a steely gaze for the first time in our relationship, and she gave me one back, then sighed.

“Fine,” she said. “Do whatever you want. I don't even care. But I'm going to be arguing to have the books recalled at the meeting.”

“Great,” I said. “Do what you think is right. We don't have to agree on everything.”

“We should,” she said.

“But we can't,” I said. “No couple agrees on everything all the time.”

She nodded a bit, then sighed, then looked back at the pregnancy test for a minute before putting it in the glove compartment, so if anyone who was going to Hurricane's walked by and looked in the windshield, they wouldn't see it. We just kind of stared out at Cedar Avenue for a few minutes before Paige said, “Teddy bears.”

“I still have a bunch of them in the attic,” I said. “I solemnly swear, this kid will never want for teddy bears.”

“No,” she said. “I'm playing free-form Dead Celebrities. Teddy bears.”

“Oh,” I said. “Log cabins.”

“Raincoats.”

“Candelabras.”

“Cheese sticks.”

“Souvenir-hunting Viennese undertakers.”

She paused a bit after that one before saying, “Uh . . . Leslie's pantsuits.”

“
The Woman Pissing
by Picasso.”

“Headlights.”

“Un Chien Andalou.”

“Wooden fences.”

“Thomas Edison.”

“Licorice.”

“Wackford's Coffee.”

“That nasty body spray Keith wears too much of.”

We never did go into Hurricane's. Other people from Paige's crowd walked right past the car and didn't even see us, and Paige turned off her phone so she wouldn't get texts asking where she was. The two of us just sat there in the front seat, playing free-form Dead Celebrities until neither of us could think of anything at all to say.

We were lucky this wasn't caucus season, the time when all the presidential hopefuls swarm on Iowa and bombard us with ads about what's wrong with America and how they're going to fix it (usually the problem is “we've strayed from the course,” and the solution is to hug a cute kid on television and talk about “values”). We get so many political commercials for so many candidates that people go on vacation just to get away from them.

If that was all going on now, having a “Satan Rules” poem in a yearbook could have turned into a regular nationwide political issue, if it was a slow news week otherwise. Every candidate would have to make a statement about it. And not even the most liberal guy in town was likely to come out in favor of the poem. No one's going to get elected as the “pro-Satanism” candidate.

And I can only imagine what some of those guys would have thought if they had come into Cornersville Trace High School that Monday, the day of Operation Satanic Youth Gone Wild. People
in the shirts were everywhere, particularly in front of the school, where a bunch of people in devil horns were drumming up support for our cause.

Even Stan was helping out. When I got to the school campus, he was standing just outside of school grounds with the box of  T-shirts, passing them out to anyone bold enough to wear them. Dustin was distributing pentagrams. I was enlisted to hand out pamphlets about Satanism that Stan had printed up (or possibly just had in stock at all times). A couple of guys were loudly singing that Mountain Goats song about the death metal band, the one that goes “Hail Satan,” over and over at the end. People were throwing horns in the air everywhere I looked. It gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling.

It's a good thing the guy who shows up now and then to stand right off campus and pass out free Bibles wasn't there that day. That would have been awkward.

I flipped through the pamphlet, which explained that Satanism isn't
really
about worshipping the devil; it's about ego, intellect, and moral objectivism. From what I read it all boiled down to one of those “as long as I'm okay, screw the rest of you” philosophies.

Some if it was at least halfway sensible, really, but I think I liked worshipping Stan a lot better than actual Satanism. Still, Satanists were people too, and as far as I was concerned, they had the same rights as everybody else.

We were working our way through our supplies, glad-handing and encouraging people like we were lower-tier presidential candidates doing a meet and greet at a pancake breakfast, when Leslie came up to me, looking pissed.

“What in the fuck are you doing?” she asked.

“I'm standing up,” I said.

“You're convincing kids to worship the devil?”

“Nah,” I said. “This pamphlet just sort of explains their side. It's mostly crap, really, but you've got to let them say their thing, right?”

She ripped the one I was holding out my hand and tore it up.

“You could at least read it first,” I said.

“I don't have to,” she said.

“See you at the meeting, then.”

Most of the yearbook committee seemed to be on Leslie's side, but not necessarily all of them. Catherine showed up a few minutes later, slipped an
I SOLD MY SOUL FOR ROCKY ROAD
T-shirt over the white one she'd been wearing, and started clapping her hands and going “Woooo” to draw people over to us, not unlike the way cheerleaders advertised roadside car washes. It worked. When someone came up who wasn't, like, one of
us,
she was able to speak in their language. She was like a Satanic liaison to the prep community.

By the time we all got to class the word was out that there would be a meeting in the yearbook room after school to stand up for the rights of Satanists to have their message in any school yearbook that also let the Christians have their say. By then there was at least one “Satanist” in just about every classroom. I saw some of the pamphlets ripped up and tossed on the floor of the hallway, but that was no worse than what kids did to the free Bibles that people passed out now and then.

None of the teachers really seemed to take much notice of what was going on, except for Mrs. Mandlebaum, my English teacher. She called me up to her desk while everyone else was filling out a worksheet about
The Canterbury Tales
.

“I understand you're one of the ringleaders of this whole Satan thing,” she said.

“I'm not really a Satanist,” I said, “but I believe in freedom of religion.”

“This is not a religion,” she said. “It's
anti
religion.”

“That's a
kind
of religion,” I said. “Have any of them hurt anybody today?”

She glared at me, but admitted they hadn't.

“Have they been acting up in class?”

She shook her head.

“Well, there you are, then,” I said. “There's no rule in the handbook about what religion you can be.”

And I went back to my seat.

Maybe it was just my imagination, but I actually thought that the kids who were wearing the devil shirts, the pentagrams, and the horns were better behaved than they usually were. A lot of them were back-row hooligans and smart-asses who spent most of their time in class mouthing off and throwing paper around. Today they were pretty calm. Maybe they were taking one of the Eleven Satanic Rules, the one that said “When in another's lair, show him respect,” to heart. The big-haired woman who gave the talk about manners and grace at the debutante ball would have found a lot to agree with in the Satanic Rules.

I didn't see Paige much during the day, except for once when we passed in the hall. She blew her hair upwards, then gave me kind of a half smile and a shrug, and I gave her one back.

Then, when the yearbook meeting came, the tribes assembled. Plenty of people had offered to come back the poem up, and probably
an equal number were so offended that they decided to come help argue for a reprint.

The whole yearbook staff was present, of course, with Leslie and Paige representing the anti-Satan side, along with Mr. Perkins, Mrs. Smollet (of course), and a couple of other teachers. We were up against a lot. They had all the people with any actual power.

But the room was filled to overflowing with kids wearing pentagrams, Satanic T-shirts, and devil horns.

“All right,” I said. “Here we are. We've come to argue against reprinting.”

“To be honest,” said Mr. Perkins. “the decision has already been made, but I'll let you make your speech, Leon. Why do you think we should still let this yearbook go out as is?”

“As you can see,” I said, “we have a number of people who might be Satanists in the school. If you can put poems in like that Jesus one that was in the yearbook from last year, why not a Satanic one?”

“I don't think the person responsible for the poem thought they were representing a religion,” said Leslie. “They were just trying to cause trouble, and they must have somehow slipped it into the pile of poems to be laid out, because I
know
we never approved it.”

Paige looked at me, as though she knew exactly what had happened, which she probably did. She didn't say anything, though.

“I agree,” said Mrs. Smollet. “It would be one thing if someone would even take responsibility for it.”

“That's not how Satanic messages work,” I said. “Hiding messages is a sort of Satanic tradition.”

“So is hiding your identity, apparently,” said Mrs. Smollet.

“Then
I'm
a Satanist, and
I
wrote it,” I said.

Then Jenny stood up and said
she
was a Satanist and
she
wrote it.

And pretty soon half the room was taking credit for it. They were all chuckling, so it wasn't so dramatic that I could really compare it to people saying “I am Spartacus” or anything. But good feelings swelled inside of me. Mrs. Smollet looked like she was going to be sick.

Mr. Perkins sighed. “Okay,” he said. “If you're all done, I'll tell you what we're doing. It would be
way
too expensive to recall and reprint the yearbook on short notice, but I still don't think we can put it out as is. We're going to go through every copy and put a sticker over the poem.”

“Why not just put a sticker over the second line so the acrostic says ‘Stan Rules'?” I asked.

“Because Stan doesn't rule,” said Paige.

This was the first thing she'd said to me the whole day.

“Let's be totally blunt,” said Mr. Perkins. “The poem is lousy anyway, and if you changed one line, that would wreck the rhyme scheme and make it even worse. No one approved it, anyway. So we're just going to cover it up and forget about it. Everyone on yearbook, please grab some stickers from the pile on the desk, and let's get to work. Meeting adjourned.”