The Scar Boys (15 page)

I’d already been through six years of sessions with Dr. Kenny, and I was having none of it. The only thing I’d ever wanted was a normal life, and there was no place for a pediatric psychiatrist in the world I was trying to build. My parents—my mom still indulging my every desire and my dad wanting to save money—took my side.

Dr. Kenny seemed genuinely worried at our last session.

“Well, the music will be good therapy, I guess,” he told me, and he turned out to be right. “You take care, Harbinger Jones,” he said as I left his office for the last time.

I did have some regret, not because I thought I needed therapy—though, of course I did—but because I really liked and trusted Dr. Kenny. It’s why I was calling him and not my parents from that phone booth in Athens.

Just after
Lima
and right before
Lisbon
Dr. Kenny came on the line.

“Harry, is that you?” he asked, as I continued to gasp for air.

“Yes.”

“It’s been a while, Harry.” Dr. Kenny dropped his voice a cool octave. It was one of his Jedi mind tricks, and it worked. A
this-isn’t-the-anxiety-you’re-looking-for
sort of thing. “Can you tell me what’s happening?”

I didn’t know where to begin. My brain fumbled through the facts of my life, groping for a starting point, but found none.

“Harry, it will help if you talk to me.”

I saw my reflection in the glass of the phone booth and I froze.

Throughout the course of my life, I’d had one of two reactions on seeing myself in a mirror:

But something different happened in the phone booth that night. For reasons I didn’t understand then and don’t understand now, rather than scare me, my face—with all of its horror intact—was, for the first time in my life, a
comfort. Maybe I had become so emotionally isolated that I had no one left to turn to other than myself. Or maybe I just didn’t care anymore. Whatever the reason, my reflection gave me a glimmer of stability. The phone call to Dr. Kenny started to feel like a bad idea.

“Nothing,” I mumbled, “I’m okay. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

“Harry, wait,” Dr. Kenny said before I could hang up. I didn’t answer, but I knew he could hear me breathing. “I want you to listen to me carefully. You need to get yourself to an emergency room. Can you do that? For me?”

I didn’t answer again. My heart rate was starting to retreat from the redline. Barely, but noticeably, I was starting to feel the ground beneath my feet again.

“Harry?”

“No, really doc. I’m going to be okay. And I am sorry to have bothered you. Thank you.” I hung up and stood there for a few minutes with my forehead pressed against the glass, letting its smooth surface cool me. I remember that I laughed out loud, but I don’t remember why. Had someone been passing by, I’m sure I would’ve sounded batshit crazy. Lucky for me, the street was deserted.

I left the phone booth and began the long walk back.

When I got back to the skate house, I found Cheyenne sitting on the back stoop. Her legs were pulled up tight against her chest and she was rocking back and forth with the precision of a metronome. She didn’t say anything or even look up when I approached.

“Hey,” I muttered, ready to scoot around her and retreat inside. I was still shaky from my walk and phone call, and felt like maybe I should be alone. But when I passed her, I could hear that Cheyenne was crying. The sound stopped me in my tracks.

I didn’t know what to do. A crying girl wasn’t anything I’d encountered before.

Wait, strike that.

Dana Dimarco.

I was eleven years old and had been walking home across the otherwise deserted elementary school playground. Dana was there, sitting on a swing, dragging her foot in a small, slow circle on the asphalt. She was sobbing openly.

I had stayed late after school that day to avoid a bully named Jamie Cosite. He was a year younger than me and was planning to beat me up. I knew this because during playtime on the kickball field he told me, “I’m going to beat you up.”

Going against my better judgment I asked him, “Why?”

“Whaddya mean why?”

“I mean why do you want to beat me up?” I had been so routinely abused by other kids that I guess on some level, I figured I had nothing to lose.

“Because look at you,” he said, his friends laughing at his oh-so-clever wit. Cosite had too many freckles and an unnaturally square jaw; he looked like a ventriloquist dummy.

“So?”

That was all he needed. He punched me in the face right then and there, and kicked me in the shoulder as I went down. A teacher saw the commotion and walked straight over to where we were standing. Jamie stopped the assault when he saw her coming toward us, but managed to get in a quick “I’ll finish you after school,” before the teacher’s presence sent all the other kids scattering.

Miss Chardette—“Bulldog Chardette”—the warden of
my sixth-grade class, stood over me. I was alone, lying there on the ground, looking up at her, silently pleading for help. She just shook her head and walked away.

That was the last time I talked back to a bully.

When the last bell rang that day, going outside seemed like a bad idea, so I hid in a coat closet. This was right after Dr. Kenny had first taught me to use lists as calming devices. I began with the only one other than lightning that I’d memorized to that point: US presidents. I ran through the list forward and backward. I counted the even-numbered presidents, and then the odd-numbered presidents. I figured out that the most common letter of the alphabet to begin a president’s last name was “H”—Harrison, Hayes, Harrison, Harding, and Hoover—and that only one president’s last name began with the letter “L”—Lincoln. The exercise must’ve worked, because I fell asleep.

When I woke up and dragged myself out of the closet, the clock on the wall of the classroom said it was four p.m. The school was deserted. That’s when I went outside and found Dana Dimarco crying on the swings.

As I walked by, she looked out from underneath her copper bangs. She didn’t say anything, but I know she saw me. She cast her eyes back to the ground and started crying louder.

I figured I had two choices:

I chose door number two, and I’ve regretted it every day of my life since.

If I had talked to Dana Dimarco, maybe I would’ve made a friend. Truth is, she wasn’t totally awful to me most of the time. I bet if I had bothered to ask her what was wrong—and I think she
wanted
me to ask—maybe my whole life would’ve been different.

I sat down next to Cheyenne, leaving a healthy buffer between us. She didn’t say a word, but she didn’t have to; something in the air told me that being there was the right thing to do. She needed company.

I don’t know how long we sat there—the two of us on that stoop, saying nothing—but the sky turned from the color of a plum, to the color of faded blue jeans, to dawn, and Chey had stopped crying. I’d almost forgotten she was next to me. I was just starting to hatch this crazy idea that we should steal a van to finish the tour when Chey cleared her throat and brought me back to reality.

I turned to face her. She must have sensed that she had my attention because she didn’t look up before she spoke.

“We had a big fight.” Her voice was flat, matter-of-fact. I didn’t have to ask who
we
was. I knew who
we
was.

“Oh.” I didn’t know what to say next, so I said nothing.

Chey plowed on, not realizing that I was the last person on the planet who wanted to hear about her problems with Johnny. “He wants us to leave, to go home. I told him we all agreed to wait until the end of the week, but he says he doesn’t care, he wants to leave now and I should go with him.”

“Mmm-hmm,” I said.

I know what you’re thinking. This was my chance to pile on Johnny, drive a wedge between him and Cheyenne, but honestly, I didn’t have it in me.

“He has money, you know.” This caught my attention.

“No, I didn’t know.”

“Yep.”

“How much?”

“Like five hundred dollars. His parents gave it to him for emergencies.
Chey
,” she said, mocking Johnny’s voice, “
if this isn’t an emergency, I don’t know what is
.”

Johnny had money? He and Chey were fighting? I didn’t know what to do. I’d only just barely pulled myself back from the edge of a breakdown and I felt empty, hollowed out, like someone had removed all of my internal organs
and replaced them with bags full of sand. Nothing in me was real.

Chey started to cry again, which was the only sound in the world less bearable than the silence.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Are you going with him?”

“To do what?” she said, unable or unwilling to sniffle the edge out of her voice. “Spend a week following him around until he leaves for Syracuse? Then what? Follow him there? He begged me to go, but I don’t see the point.”

“Johnny begged you to go?” I couldn’t picture Johnny begging anyone for anything.

“I guess that’s not the right word. He kinda ordered me to go. That’s what started the fight.”

I nodded. Something about Johnny ordering Chey to go with him reminded me of my father, maybe because it had the unmistakable ring of moral superiority. It never occurred to either one of them—Johnny or my dad—that they could possibly be wrong, about anything, ever.

Case in point: Once, a few years earlier, Johnny told me that he’d heard “they” were breeding six-legged chickens.

“Huh?” I responded.

“Yeah, I saw it on a TV show. They want to sell more drumsticks.” Johnny was always bringing some crazy bit of information like that to our rehearsals:

“They’re using coffee enemas to cure cancer.”

“A nail punch will shatter your car’s windshield if you ever drive into a lake.”

“Carrie Fisher is really a dude.”

Crazy as these tidbits sounded, this was Johnny, so I just accepted whatever he said as true. The chicken thing though, sounded just a bit too crazy, so I put up a meager and casual resistance, which for me was a lot.

“C’mon,” I said, “that can’t be for real.”

Johnny was flabbergasted. You could almost hear him thinking,
How dare you talk back
.

He quoted every detail he could remember from the television show—except its name—and kept pushing, not letting us rehearse until I said I believed him. I never did. I finally shrugged my shoulders, thinking the whole thing was funny, and that the incident was over. But Johnny was so hell-bent on proving his point—just like my dad would’ve been in the same situation—that he actually wrote a letter to Frank Perdue for validation. Really. Frank Perdue. I kid you not. As far as I know, the letter went unanswered.

When I think about it now, I wonder if Johnny wasn’t some sort of surrogate for my dad. Freaky. And beside the point.

“I don’t know what to do, Harry,” Chey said. It was more or less an open plea for help, but I had nothing. I wanted to help Cheyenne—more than anything in the
world I wanted to help Cheyenne—but I couldn’t even help myself.

The last time I’d felt this way was the afternoon I’d been rejected by Gabrielle. That day Johnny was there to pick me up. “We should start a band,” he’d said. It was like a magic phrase—abracadabra, hocus pocus, and open sesame all rolled into one. It made me forget the pain for just long enough to move on to the next thing.

Sitting there with Chey, I wished for that magic phrase again. Strike that. Not for the phrase, but for how it made me feel, full of wonder and promise. I wished I had bottled that feeling, let it age, and uncorked it there on that porch.

And that’s when it hit me. The only thing in the world that could ever make anyone feel truly better.

“I have an idea,” I said, “that will help us both.” I reached out my hand for Chey. This was so unlike me—taking action and initiative, being direct—that I’m not sure she knew what to do. After a moment she put her hand in mine and let me help her up.

“Let’s go.”

During our first sixty hours in Athens, we’d done the following: