Reality Boy (19 page)

After a minute, Beth says, “Shit. The tension here is intense.” When neither of us answers, she laughs to herself and answers for us. “Yes, Beth, it is. It’s because we’re teenagers and can’t figure out how to talk to each other.”

“Hey!” Hannah says. “I’m not some idiot just because of my age.”

“Yeah,” I say.

“So what’s the problem?” Beth asks.

I shrug.

Hannah says, “I asked Gerald today to stop going off into his little dreamworld because it’s hard to deal with him when he does that and he freaked out on me and called me a brainless moron.”

“I did not call you a brainless moron. I called you a brain
washed
moron because you brought up the bullshit you saw on the TV from when I was five. Jesus! How the fuck would you feel if I had twenty-four-seven movies of your house when you were five and said something like
Hannah, stop being so emotional. You’ve always been emotional—don’t you remember that time when you were five?
” I take a breath. “Anyway, if you believe that’s really what my house was like, you’re wrong. And so making judgments from those bullshit shows… or even bringing it the hell up is just out of line, man.”

“But you do space out,” Hannah presses.

“Yeah, I do. So fuckin’ what? Who doesn’t need a minute to themselves every now and then, okay? I space out. I go on a journey. I zone. Whatever. Who cares? And why does that give you the right to psychoanalyze me?” I say.

Hannah sighs. She has tears in her eyes. “Look. At lunch, I was just trying to say that sometimes you’re hard to talk to. And you’ve proven that I’m right in every possible way. Whatever. Be immature if you want. I don’t care.”

She walks away from the hot dog–wrapping table and leaves me and Beth here, wrapping. My phone buzzes in my pocket again and I can see it’s not Hannah texting me, so I stop and take off my plastic glove to check the message.

It’s from Joe Jr.
Can you talk?
That’s the first text, from earlier.

Dude. Can you talk?
That’s the second text.

I tell Beth that I have to go to the bathroom and I find my way to the smokers’ alley, where I first met Joe. I dial his number, but he doesn’t answer. I leave a voice mail.

“Hey, Joe. It’s Gerald. I just got your texts and wanted to talk. I’m working, though, so I have to go back now, but I’ll call you again on break.” Oh shit. I remember it’s Dollar Night and there are no breaks. Okay. “Or I’ll call you when I’m off work. Hey, I was serious about me coming to see you. I want to do it. My birthday’s in a week, and I asked my mom for a gas card.”

I hang up and instantly regret nearly all of that voice mail. Voice mail was invented by confident people to make unconfident people say stupid shit that gets taped and haunts us forever.

As I walk by Hannah on my way to register #7, I say, “Oh, and nice touch writing
asshole
on my dashboard. Your maturity is oozing. Maybe you need to spend less time analyzing me and more time asking why you’d vandalize my car.”

“Because you were being an asshole,” she says.

I turn around at register #3. “All depends how you look at it. Because from my side, it was the person
writing on my car
who was being the asshole. All I did was tell you the truth,” I say. “It’s not my fault if you can’t handle it.”

“Dude, that’s what
I
was doing. Telling you the truth,” she says. More tears in her eyes.

“You don’t know anything about me, Hannah. Nothing,” I say, and I walk to #7. As luck would have it, the employees come to buy their pregame food and I ring them up and get busy while Hannah gets some time to sulk. If nothing else, I hope she’s learned that playing head games with a kid whose whole life is a hellacious head game is a bad idea.

I always forget how bad Dollar Night sucks. We sell out of our four hundred hot dogs before third period. Before we do, we have this crotchety old man telling us that the hot dog is cold and we tell him no, just the bun is cold and he says that the cold bun is making the hot dog cold and that we should steam our rolls and that he’d like to return a half-eaten hot dog for his dollar back.

Roger has a name for this kind of thing when he’s in therapy mode. He calls it priority confusion. This guy is so worked up over the temperature of his hot dog that he can’t see how unreasonable he’s being about returning a half-eaten hot dog.

We all have priority confusion throughout the day. Some have it more than others, I guess.

This brings me to Roger’s lessons about the high road. Not only did I have to give up the words of anger—
should
,
deserve
, etc.—but also I had to start owning my shit. So, for example, I have no trouble admitting that I bit Tasha’s hand last Saturday. I’m not sorry about it. Frankly, in the case of calling Hannah a brainwashed moron today, I’m also not sorry about it.
But
as Roger so cleverly points out, just appearing to be on the high road puts you on it. And so I know that part of my head game with Hannah will be to apologize first. That way it’s her problem and no longer my problem. Roger calls that
cleaning the slate
.

There is a lull before we start closing down the stand and I go to Hannah and she looks at me with her mean face and I say, “I know I’m hard to talk to sometimes. I know I go off into my own world. I do that on purpose.” I shift in my shoes a little because her expression hasn’t changed. “Because I don’t trust anyone because—uh—you know. People aren’t really trustworthy and they bring up my past and shit and it’s not very comfortable.”

She doesn’t say anything.

“So I’m sorry I said that at lunch, but there are a lot of people who believe what they saw on TV and I don’t want you to be one of them, okay? And at some point, whenever it hits you that you were wrong, you can feel free to apologize for vandalizing my car,” I say. Then I go out to the condiment stand and start to haul over the big containers of ketchup, mustard, and barbecue sauce.

Dollar Night crowds are slobs. I had to come out here
twice tonight and clear off their mess, and now it’s filled again—mostly with hot dog wrappers. There are trash cans in every direction, but they just leave them here like this is acceptable behavior.

And if anyone knows about acceptable behavior, it’s me.

SCRUBBING THE HOT
dog roller tonight is a long job made for someone with a lot of upper-body strength. That’s me. By the time I’m finished and taking the grease tray to the sink, everything else has been done and Register #4 Guy is about to start mopping. Hannah has taken off her PEC Center Food Service shirt and is standing there in her punk rock black sleeveless T-shirt that says
UP YOURS
on the front.

As I walk by her with the clean and dry tray for the roller, I say, “You want a ride home tonight or is your dad coming to pick you up?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks.

I keep walking. I’m the clean one now. I made my apology
and owned my shit. So I replace the tray, grab my coat from the little cubby next to register #7, and go out the door to the bathroom, where I pee, wash my hands, and check my face for any stray grease or barbecue sauce.

On my way out of the bathroom, I bump right into someone familiar and I can’t place her until she smiles and holds out her arms for a hug and then I flinch because of my ribs. She looks at me and asks me how I am.

“I’m good,” I say. I say this loud enough so that Hannah can hear, because I can feel her watching me.

“Good,” Hockey Lady says. “I worry about you.”

“I’ll be seventeen in a week. Only one more year until I’m out of that house,” I say.

She nods. “What did you ask for, for your birthday?”

“I asked for a gas card. That way I can save for college instead of putting all my money from this job into my gas tank.”

“Practical,” she says. “You take after your father.”

If staying married to a neglectful, magazine-page-turning nutcase is practical, sure
, I think.

She hugs me again. “Well, if I don’t see you before next week, happy birthday, Gerald. Seventeen,” she says, and shakes her head. “I’m so glad you made it.”

“Me, too,” I say.

“I had my doubts,” she says. And that’s what’s left echoing in my head as she walks away.
I had my doubts.

I take off my PEC Center T-shirt as I walk toward the door of stand five and I can feel my other shirt go up with it,
which means Hannah is getting a full view of my very muscular and bruised upper body and I take my time straightening myself out.

I find Beth and ask her if she needs any more help closing the stand.

“Nope,” she says.

“You sure?” We smile at each other. I’m pretty sure she knows what I’m doing.

“Everything okay?” she asks.

“Totally.”

She smiles. “Don’t look now, but Hannah is waiting for you at the door,” she says. “Want me to put you on register number two tomorrow?”

“Seven,” I say. Very seriously. “I’m always on seven.”

I say good night and tiptoe over the mopped parts of the floor and head toward the door and there’s Hannah, just like Beth said.

“Hey,” I say, as if she didn’t write
ASSHOLE
on my dashboard.

“Hey,” she says, as if she didn’t write
ASSHOLE
on my dashboard.

Then, before we can talk, my phone buzzes again and I say, “Sorry, Hannah. I have to get this really quick. Do you mind?”

I look at the number on my phone. It’s Joe Jr.

“Hello?” I say.

“Dude,” he says. “What’s shaking?”

“Nothing much. Just leaving work now. What’s up, man? You okay?”

“Uh—nah. You got room for a circus freak in your house?”

“Did you run away?” I ask. This makes Hannah’s ears perk up. She’s still very interested in running away. To anywhere. Apparently with any
ASSHOLE
, too.

“Not yet. But I’m thinking on it,” he says.

“I wish I could, but I think my parents would freak,” I say.

“I can do more than just clean fucking buses and run around being the talent’s gofer,” he says. “I’m just so ready to go find another show and get to use my own talent, you know?”

“You’re not a dentist clown, are you?” I ask.

He laughs. “No.”

“So what are you?”

He’s quiet for a second and then he says, “What’s your e-mail? I’ll send you a link. You can check it out when you get home.”

“Cool,” I say. “I will.” I give him my e-mail address.

“Sometimes I can’t figure out what I’m doing here,” he says.

“I feel the same way,” I say. “Just without the clown dentistry part.”

“Fuck this shit, man.”

I answer, “Fuck this shit.” And then we hang up.

I can’t figure out if I helped him or not, but just talking to him made me want to run away tonight.

“So?” Hannah says.

“So… what?”

“Is he running away?”

I stop and look at her. Man, her freckles are gorgeous. “Why are you so interested in running away?” I ask.

She shrugs. “I just am.”

“Isn’t your dad coming to pick you up in a minute?” I ask. “I have to go to the parking garage,” I say, pointing toward it. “You should be out front.”

She looks down. “I told him I had a ride,” she says. She looks at me and pushes her mouth over to the left, as if she’s chewing on the inside of her cheek.

“With the asshole,” I add.

“Yeah,” she says. “I have a ride with the asshole.”

I don’t smile. I have all these thoughts. Crazy thoughts. Like, on the one hand, I want to kiss her passionately, like they do in movies, and just paralyze her with this feeling of how much I want to take care of her. On the other hand, she’s like Tasha somehow. She’s a girl, for one thing, and she wrote
ASSHOLE
on my dashboard. And she hasn’t apologized, so if I let her in my car and take her home, I will be like Mom and Dad, who never punished Tasha for writing
ASSHOLE
on my whole life.

“Look, I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ll clean it off tomorrow. I promise. I was just so mad at you!”

“Doesn’t mean you had to do something crazy,” I say.

She throws her hands up. “I’m not fucking crazy!”

“I didn’t say you were. I said writing
asshole
on my car was crazy,” I say. “But Saturday night, before I picked you up, you were walking right toward murder central to go to Ashley’s
house and you didn’t care, so maybe you are crazy. I don’t know.”

We’re standing still now—I think because I haven’t indicated that I’m actually driving her home. I start walking down the block toward the parking garage and make a sign like she should follow me. The wind is harsh. I zip my coat to my neck and she wraps her scarf extra tight around her chin. Then she slips her arm into mine, and we walk, connected, with our hands in our pockets.

When we get into the car and I start it up and crank the heat, she says, “Dude, that’s not hot yet. Now you’re just blowing cold air.”

I turn down the fan and rub my hands together to get warm. I stare at what she wrote on the dashboard. I look for something to say, but I can’t find anything except the truth about how I’m feeling, which is: like an asshole. I sigh.