Reality Boy (16 page)

“What the hell, kid?” Bob says again. I’m breathing fast, my mouth forced open by the mouth guard, and then I realize he’s talking to me.

What the hell, kid?

Jacko isn’t saying anything, either, as Bob shoves shit up his nose and takes a soaking sponge to his face to see where the cuts are. I’m still dancing. Hopping. Waiting. My body is in destroy mode. Bob walks over to me and motions for me to hold out my gloves. He pulls them off and my hands are like clubs.

“You didn’t even tape up?” he asks.

It echoes.
You didn’t even tape up?

It’s a dumb question, asked by someone who thinks we
thought
about this. Like Bob hasn’t met angry, impulsive teenage boys before today.

He makes me sit on a stool in the corner of the ring with my hands in a bucket of ice water. He takes Jacko to the office and as I sit there, I wonder again if Hannah will visit me in jail.

“I’ll visit,” Snow White says.

“I will, too,” Lisi says.

“I’d really like to talk about it now,” I say.

They disappear and it echoes.
I’d really like to talk about it now.

I AM IN
my happy place, surfing the Internet with ice on my cheek and ribs and hands and anywhere else I can put it. Mom asked me what the ice was for. I told her I’d been at the gym and that my hands hurt. That didn’t surprise her at all.

She’s going to see my cheek, though, if it bruises. And so will Roger, at tomorrow’s appointment. It’s not like I came out looking as bad as the fake Jamaican, though. He was so messed up, I’m checking my window for the cops every five minutes.

The Internet helps me forget. Some guys watch music videos. Some guys watch porn. I watch circus videos because I really think I’m going to do it. I really think Joe Jr. is wrong about how great I have it. He doesn’t live in a cage, you know?

As I play the same trapeze video over and over and stare at the monitor, I try to will myself into Gersday, with no luck. It’s as if Gersday has been hacked and someone changed my password.

The trapeze artists are like magic. It’s a circus in Monaco, where no one has heard of the Crapper. These three Asian women and three Asian men do this act. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen in my life—so many spins and twists, and then they manage to catch each other in midair. How do they do that? I half think about trying it—trapeze—but then I remember that everything is pointless, like boxing. Learning trapeze would only mean I would never be able to actually perform on a trapeze.

I click on a different video and I watch a guy do a double flip and miss his catch and land in the net. The audience applauds anyway.

I hear Mom call my name, but I ignore it. Then she calls again. “Gerald! Phone!”

I go into my parents’ bedroom to pick up the cordless and I can’t figure out who would call me at home. I think maybe it’s Lisi and she got my mental message that I needed to talk. Or maybe it’s the police.

“Hey,” Hannah says. Then Mom hangs up.

My heart stops for a second when I realize it’s her.

“You there?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “Hi. How’d you—uh—I mean, wow. I was pretty sure our number was unlisted.”

“It is,” she says.

“Oh.” I walk to my room quickly so Mom can’t hear me, and I close the door.

“Beth gave it to me,” she explains.

I’m pretty sure Beth only had my cell number, but whatever. It really doesn’t matter now, does it? “So hey. You working on Wednesday?” I ask. “Dollar Night. Should be a riot.”

“I didn’t call to talk about work,” she says. “I called to talk about you.”

“Me?”

“You.”

“What about me? I mean—yeah. What about me?” I say.

“I like you. I want to go out on a date or something. Together,” she says. “And before you tell me again that you’re not allowed, you should know that I’m not allowed, either, and that my parents can’t know and my brother sure as hell can’t know.”

I’m in Gersday. My desk is made of waffle cone. I am ice cream. Peach soft-serve ice cream.

“Gerald?” she says.

“Yeah.”

“And just so you know, this isn’t some defiant shit I’m doing. I mean—I’ve liked you for a while and I was too shy to say anything because, well, you’re Gerald.”

I say, “Wow. I had no idea.” And then after an uncomfortable second of searching for something else to say, I say, “I’d love to take you on a date…. God. That sounds so retarded.”

“Don’t say that,” she says.

“What?”

“Going on a date doesn’t sound retarded. Plus, that word bugs me. So there’s rule number one. No saying
retarded
.”

“Huh,” I say. “I hear it a lot, so I guess it doesn’t really bug me anymore. But if we’re making rules, I have one.”

“Yes, we’re making rules. What’s yours?”

I have no idea what my rule is, so I blurt out, “No musicals. I really hate musicals. Movies, stage, any musicals, forget it,” I say. This is a joke, but she doesn’t laugh. She sounds nervous.
You don’t seriously believe she likes you, right? You’re probably on speakerphone right now, her friends huddled around with their hands over their mouths, giggling.

“That’s easy. I hate musicals, too,” she says. “And no chick flicks. I hate that shit.”

“Deal,” I say. I reach up to my face with my sore right hand and feel my smile. I trace it with my index finger.

“How can being called retarded not bug you?” she asks. “I mean, you know. I know everyone in your class has been called something at least once, but still.”

So she knows I go to SPED class. Good. “I guess being Gerald ‘the Crapper’ Faust has its benefits,” I say. “Plus, there’s a lot you don’t know.”

“Then we’ll have to schedule long walks to talk about it,” she says.

I don’t know what to say.
I give it a week, tops, before you fuck it up completely.

“Gerald?”

“Yeah?”

“So—uh—you’re not just saying yes out of pity, are you?”

“What did you mean when you said you were shy because I’m Gerald?” I ask.

“Uh—you’re Gerald. Famous. A local celeb. Generally untouchable by any reality TV star who came after you.”

“Shit,” I say.

“Sorry.”

“I’m not famous. I’m infamous,” I say. “There’s a big difference.”

“I don’t know. I think you’re famous,” she says. “And I should know. I even remember when the paper ran a story about your family and my mom cut it out for me so I could keep it.”

“You watched that crap?”

“Yeah. Didn’t you?”

“You don’t seem very shy to me,” I say.

“I’m shy until you get to know me. Then I’m just Hannah.” She laughs a little. “And, Gerald?”

“Yeah?”

“Tomorrow in school—you’ll be okay and stuff? Like—to me? This isn’t a big joke or anything, is it?”

I had no idea other people could be as paranoid as I am. Especially not Hannah. She seems so confident. Maybe that’s why she sees a shrink. Maybe she’s paranoid. Maybe she’s bipolar—up and down like Tasha. Shit.

“What?” I say. “Of course I’ll be okay to you in school. We’re friends. Like, even if this dating thing doesn’t work out. We’re friends.” I say this like I’m in some Charlie Brown movie. Like I’m Linus and she’s a girl Linus.

“That’s cute,” she says. “Probably impossible, but cute. Now go explain to your mom that I’m not a weirdo. She acted like I was some stalker or something when I asked for you. I’m guessing you guys might get that a lot.” She laughs like it’s funny, but we did get stalkers a lot, once.

“Okay,” I say.

“I’m going to watch last night’s episode of
Dumb Campers
that I recorded. Can’t wait to see who got voted off. Bye, Gerald.”

“Bye.”

I think,
Rule number three: No talking about reality TV. Ever.

I sit there for a minute and smile.

When I open my door to return the phone to my parents’ bedroom, Mom is at the top of the steps.

“Who was that?” she asks.

“Just a girl from school,” I say.

“That’s what she told me. But how’d she get our number? I thought we only gave out cell numbers, remember?”

“Yeah. Sorry. I think I gave it to her by accident. We were in a rush,” I say.

“A rush?”

“Yeah. She needed help with linear equations,” I lie. “It was the end of class. The old number just came out, I think.”

I walk through her bedroom and return the handset. She’s still at the top of the stairs when I get back. “Linear equations?” she asks.

“Yeah. Who knew?” I say. Then I go back to my room
and close the door. I lie on my bed and close my eyes and I jump back into Gersday, where I want to tell Lisi about how I have a girlfriend. I want to be on the trapeze, catching her as she catches me. I want to be the joint that she smokes so that we can finally talk about everything without having to use words, because I will be a drug in her brain. I want peach soft-serve ice cream. I want to
be
peach soft-serve ice cream.

I whisper, “I demand to be peach soft-serve ice cream.”

“DON’T YOU DARE
say a word,” Tasha said in my ear.

She had her knee pinned right in the middle of my back. The neighbor kid, Mike, was still naked in her bed, lying there smiling.

“I’m twelve now and I can do what I want,” Tasha said. “And you’re gay anyway, so you should just get out of here and go dream of wieners or whatever gay little retards dream about.”

Before I could run, she grabbed me by the collar of my polo shirt, and I could feel the button against my throat. “If you tell them, I’ll kill you.”

Then she let me go and I ran to my room and locked the door behind me.

Five minutes later, I could hear their noises from my room, so I sneaked downstairs to where Lisi was reading a book. This was the one day Mom trusted Tasha to babysit us while she went and trained for that weekend’s walk for multiple sclerosis or cancer or whatever the reason. She would only be gone an hour and a half, she’d said. Mike was in the house five minutes after Mom left. He lived two doors down.

This was our week off from cameras and Nanny. It was the perfect week for Tasha to bring a boy into the house through the back door. A perfect week for Mom to leave her in charge in the first place. We were all sneaking now.

I asked Lisi, “What does
gay
mean?”

She looked over her book and sighed. “You’re not gay. Tasha’s just mean.”

“But what does it mean?” I asked. I was six now. Lisi was eight. Tasha had had her twelfth birthday a few days after the chicken Parmesan night with Mom and Dad. She had wanted a sleepover party and invited ten of her friends, but only one came. Lisi said that was because she was a bitch to her friends, too.

Lisi sighed again. “
Gay
means two things. Technically, it means boys who like boys or girls who like girls. But a lot of people say it and mean
stupid
.”

“So, Tasha’s just calling me stupid?” I asked.

“Tasha is calling you both, I think. She says it to me, too.”

“Huh,” I said.

“She’s just being nasty. Six more years and she’ll be gone,” Lisi said.

“Six?” I asked. I did the math on my fingers. It meant that when I was twelve, I’d be free of Tasha.

“Yep. She’ll be at college or something. Which will be good for us.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you want me to read you some
Harry Potter
?” she asked.

I snuggled up next to her and she read until Mom came home. Mike sneaked out the back door while Mom showered, and Tasha said she had to shower, too. Back then, I had no idea what she and Mike had been doing. I didn’t know anything about sex, and I didn’t understand that twelve was probably way too young to be doing it.

So far, Tasha’s Disney World dream was close to coming true. I’d stopped crapping anywhere but the bathroom. We all did our chores. Sometimes Tasha was even nice to us. She’d offer to play a board game or do something fun. But then she’d go back to her usual self and haul off and hit me or half suffocate me and call us names. Lisi told me that Tasha was
hormonal.
I had no idea what that meant, but Lisi said it made Tasha worse than she already was, so we should just try to keep to ourselves.

That day when freshly showered Tasha and freshly showered Mom had a huge screaming match upstairs about something, we crept up the steps and peeked into Tasha’s bedroom and saw what Tasha was doing.

I remember my eyes going so wide I couldn’t blink. Lisi’s jaw dropped.

Tasha had Mom pinned up against the wall, her hands around Mom’s neck. She shouted, “Bitch! I hate you! I wish you never had me!”

Mom tried to say something, but Tasha was squeezing too hard. Then she realized she was squeezing too hard and let Mom go. Then Tasha slapped her roughly, right across the face. I lived that scene over and over in my head for years. I thought about how I should have saved Mom. How I should have stopped it somehow. But I knew I couldn’t, because I didn’t fully understand it. I didn’t know the word
psychopath
when I was six. But it would have been helpful.

I could still see the mark on Mom’s face when we all sat down to dinner that night. Lisi pointed at it to remind me. Dad didn’t come home until later, when Mom was already in bed.

I WAKE TO
find that my facial bruise from Jacko’s lucky right hook didn’t surface. It’s just a little red. My ribs? My ribs are another story. They’re purple and blue and yellow and black.

If my ribs were my face, I’d be in serious trouble.

But no one is going to see my ribs, so I just take a few headache pills and go to school. I get to my car without seeing anyone. No Mom. No Tasha. I skip the drums and the war paint. After beating the fake Jamaican in the ring yesterday, I feel like it would be disingenuous.

At lunch, Hannah finds me at the door to the caf and we walk in together and we sit in a booth and stuff the other half
of our seats full of our books. She pours out the contents of her bag and I give her half my ham and cheese sandwich in trade for a pack of Oreos from her mountain of weird junk food. She even has Pop Rocks. I didn’t think they made them anymore.