The Intervention

SHORT STORY – THE INTERVENTION
      By J. Kyle McCormick
         
    My mother could not get it through her head that, at age 15, I was old enough to pick out my own clothes. She was still picking up things at garage sales and thrift shops without even asking me. One day she brought home a jacket. I only gave it a passing glance as she explained she was going to fix the zipper and make some other repairs. I didn’t notice until the day she handed it to me that it had a pink lining with flowers and the stitching was girlish.
    “I’m not wearing this,” I told her.
    “What?” she said. “Why not?”
    “It’s a girl’s jacket,” I said.
    “Not it isn’t,” she said, a frown creeping across her face.
    “Yes, it is,” I said. “Look.”
    I showed her the lining. “That’s for girls. I’m not wearing it.”
    “Oh, Kyle,” she said as her graceful eyebrows drew into a knot and her jaw dropped open.
    "After all the work I put into it?” She just glared at me in mute shock for a moment then looked down at the jacket and shook her head.
    “How can you be so selfish?” she said. “I see guys wear things with flowers on them all the time.”
    It was true. It was the late 1970s, flowered surfer shirts were popular in Corpus Christi, Texas where I attended Baker Junior High (now Baker Middle School), and she couldn’t see the difference.
    I hesitated, wondering for a moment if I was misreading the situation. I knew better than to trust my own judgment; I’d gotten into trouble more than once for my poor judgment. I often felt swamped by emotions and experiences I didn’t understand. The drop of a pencil, a flash of light, intense smells, tastes and bright colors often whirled around me in an explosion of sensations that blasted right in my face from about 10 different directions at once. I couldn’t read people’s body language or pick up on social cues, and my lack of discretion constantly annoyed people.
    I pondered the situation now for a few moments, then shook off any doubts as I imagined what would happen if I wore a girl’s jacket to school. I couldn’t take any chances.
    “Do you know what’s going to happen if I wear this thing to school?” I said.
    My blood was already beginning to boil. My frustrations with my social ineptitude kept me in a perpetual state of agitation and it didn’t take much to set me off.  Now my mother was setting me up to be humiliated, and even worse than that, she wasn’t doing it maliciously. She was just clueless. I pitied her and felt angry with her all at the same time, which only increased the anxiety.
    “Nothing’s gonna happen, just keep it zipped all the way up and no one will see,” she said, infuriating me even more with her naivete and the excuses she was forcing on me.
    “I spent a lot of time on that jacket for it to just go to waste.”                                                     
    I could see the pain in her face. I was already feeling like her co-dependent. She’d begun confiding in me that she was miserable and felt useless – I didn’t find out until years later she’d been raped at age 17. There were so many secrets in this cold, dark house.
    My father, a talented mechanic, worked out of the house. He wasn't the kind of man you could trust with your feelings. I ended up being the only person my mother felt she could trust. The whole thing was way over my head; I was already emotionally delayed and, on top of that, I was having to contend with this too.
    I felt obligated to take care of her emotionally. I also felt compelled to defend myself against her manipulations. We were members of the Church of Christ, a church that followed a strict, liberal interpretation of the bible, and therefore had no place for people like me. Nor did the heaven it had created. It demanded absolute obedience regardless of circumstances. I had to sit in church and constantly listen to the preacher insist that children obey their parents no matter what.But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be my mother’s therapist. The whole thing was a train wreck inside my head.
    I shook with rage as I reluctantly put on the jacket. I kept it zipped all the way to the top, but as soon as I arrived at school it started.
    “Hey, look at Kyle,” Robert Vela said. “He’s wearing a girl’s jacket.”
      “That’s what he’s supposed to be wearing,” said Ruben Mota, his acne-ridden face sneering.
    “He’s the fag.”
      “I’m not a fag and shut up,” I said, shaking.
      “What?” Ruben said, raising his eyebrows and cupping his hand around his ear. “What did you say to me?”
    “Nothin’,” I said. “I didn’t-”
    “OK, class,” said Mr. Dubrawsky, dressed in jeans and a thin black beard as he
stood. “I know everybody’s excited about Marshmallow’s new jacket but it’s time to get busy.”
    Everyone busted out laughing. “Marshmallow” was the nickname he had pinned on me for looking, as he put it, "all jelled out". He was referring to the dopey look on my face from my severe allergies. The condition was chronic and kept me in a fog and I had a hard time concentrating. My watery, bloodshot eyes made people think I was stoned all the time.
    The stress of all this was exhausting. It was a major effort to do anything. I couldn’t see anything as a part of a system or a process, I couldn’t concentrate on my studies. Everyone was ripping into me for not studying and getting better grades. I was a C student, and my parents and teachers insisted I was capable of straight A's if I’d just try harder. Studying exhausted me and accomplished very little. I couldn’t make the information stick.
    We had the morning announcements and then we all put pop rocks in our mouths while we said the Pledge of Allegiance. The rocks popped and sizzled like fireworks on New Year’s Eve, then we got busy on a history assignment about U.S. troops fighting the Japanese in World War II. The assignment was due the following day, so everybody became quiet as we got to work. As a sense of dread quickly swamped me, I found myself sneaking through the jungle on Guadalcanal toward a pillbox. I was watching elephants in the savannah against a backdrop of Mt. Kilimanjaro, searching the Amazon jungle for El Dorado, and climbing Mt. Everest.
    My heart raced almost out of control I was so embarrassed. I busted out in a sweat, and my hands shook as I slowly unzipped the jacket, trying to keep anyone from hearing, but I could hear snickers all around me.
    As soon as Mr. Dubrawsky left to flirt with the teacher next door that everyone knew he was sleeping with, Ruben  said, “Don’t take it off, it fits you. You’re supposed to be wearing that, you’re the fag.” At Baker in the late 1970s, the word fag could mean either gay or geek, depending on the context.
  The kids at Baker were manic micromanagers, as I suppose most teenagers are. American society is rife with micromanaging. I think it’s only become worse since I was a teenager.
    At Baker in the 1970s, you had to wear corduroys or Levi jeans and flowered surfer shirts or white T-shirts. You had to carry a black comb in your back pocket, and you had to have your hair parted down the middle and feathered. You had to be either a jelly (their word for a dope smoker), or a kicker, or an athlete (preferably a combination of at least two of these). If even one of these things were missing, you were a fag. At least that’s how it felt.
    I just ignored Ruben and took off the jacket.  He kicked me hard in the shin and said, “Fucker I’ll kick your ass! Put it back on.”
    “You put it on!” I snapped, standing up and handing it to him.
    “Fucker, you don’t want me to kick your ass,” he said, getting right in my face. “You won’t never look the same.”
    I sat back down now, and he was leaning over me. “Put the jacket on or you’re a fag.”
    I melted beneath his penetrating stare, the fuzz on his upper lip and pointed chin seeming to bristle, and I put the jacket back on.
    “And you better keep it on,” Robert said. “We’ll kick your ass if you try to take it off.”
    I sat there frozen, unable to move. The whole world was crashing on top of me, my heart racing, sweat soaking my shirt beneath the jacket my mother had forced on me.
    “Ya’ll leave him alone!” said Letty Hinojosa. “You’re so mean!”
    I had known Letty and her brothers Pepe and Felix since we were little when they’d stay at their grandmother’s house across the street from me. After their grandmother moved, we remained friends and spent a lot of time at each other’s houses; they came over for barbecues and I went to all their birthday parties. The first birthday I remember besides my own was Felix’s; someone blindfolded me and handed me a stick and I started swinging.
    Suddenly I whacked something solid and then there were kids all around me diving for candy. A man handed me a brown bag full of candy and congratulated me for breaking the piñata. I asked if I could hit another one and everybody laughed and said, “No mijo, it doesn’t work that way.” I felt foolish for asking.
    When we got older we went to the movies, hung out at the mall or went swimming. Emotional connections were often strange and overpowering for me. Making those connections with people, outside of the chaos ravaging my brain, was extremely difficult. But, I’d known them for so long that they’d come to accept my eccentricities. The relationship felt totally comfortable. They were a welcome relief from the desolate wasteland of my isolation. We were the best of friends. 
    Letty’s brothers were in the Athena program for gifted and talented kids. Letty didn’t quite make the cut; she was brilliant in math but she couldn’t read; kids and teachers both called her stupid and lazy. We didn’t find out until we got to Moody High School that she was dyslexic. The onslaught of criticism toughened her skin and made her more outspoken and confrontational than her brothers who were quiet and immersed in their studies.
    Letty and I shared a bond through our mutual frustrations and shared joys. She’d lately been wearing a shirt with the word “Peaches” and a picture of the fruit, and I kept singing, “Really love your peaches, wanna shake your tree…” She just laughed; she had the sweetest laugh, and a smile that swept into the dimples of her olive skin. Her almond eyes wore a fierce independence that disguised a demure sensitivity; she kept small tresses of her hair tied back with a barrette, while the rest fell loosely about her shoulders.  We’d kissed playfully a few times but I didn’t think anything of it.
    We’d had our little tiffs, but we’d always worked through them. We’d just had a falling out a few days earlier when we were trying to tutor each other at her house. I went over English and history assignments for her as I always did, and she had almost total recall for anything I read to her, but I couldn’t get the whole fractions thing, and she became frustrated.
    “Why can’t you get this, it’s easy,” she said. I was immediately on the defensive.
    “Why can’t you read, it’s easy!” I snapped.
    She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and exhaled sharply, the way she always did when she was irritated. “Look I’m not gonna help you anymore if you’re gonna tell me that. I told you the words are all backwards.”
    “No they’re not, they look all straight to me,” I said.
    “OK, just forget it,” she said, getting up from her chair. “You can find someone else to help you with your math. You aren’t even trying.”
      “Fine!” I said. “Neither are you!”
      I rode my bike home in a huff.   
    Now here she was speaking up for me.
    “Oh, so you like this bolillo?” Ruben said with a grimace.
    “He’s my friend!” she quipped back at him.
    “Aaaaah, you like him,” he said. He turned to me and said, “You need girls to stick up for you. You’re a pussy!”
    He was so in my face now I could feel his hot smoky breath. Suddenly, different parts of his face started to change shape, his nose shifting, his eyes bulging or moving up and down. Even though this happened often, it was always startling, and I looked away quickly.
    “Aaaah, you’re scared! The marshmallow’s scared!”
    “Ruben, you’re always picking on people!” Letty said. “He didn’t do you nothing, leave him alone!”
    Ruben was about to say something when Mr. Dubrawsky walked back in. Ruben sat down quickly and Mr. Dubrawsky didn’t seem to notice. The bell rang and everyone left; Letty passed me and said, “Don’t pay any attention to them, they’re just bad kids.”
    She paused a minute, then said, “I’m sorry about the other day. I don’t know what got into me. You wanna come over? I’ll help you with your math.”
    “Sure,” I said. “I’m sorry for what I said too.”
    “Call me,” she said. I waited a minute until the whole class had left. I didn’t realize I was still wearing the jacket until Mr. Dubrawsky spoke up .                                                                               
    “Kyle, take that jacket off, you don’t need the kids messing with you like that.”  Thanks for calling me by my name, asshole.
    “They’re making me keep it on,” I said.
    “Who’s making you?”
    “Ruben and Robert,” I said. “They said they were gonna kick my ass if I took it off.”
    Mr. Dubrawsky scoffed as if he knew what the hell was going on in his own class, much less the school.
    “They’re not gonna kick your ass, it’s just talk,” he said. “You can’t let ‘em intimidate you like that, Kyle. They’re just trying to call your bluff and you’re lettin’ em. You have to be stronger than they are.” I resented him talking as if he had a clue about what I was going through or how to handle the situation. 
    “Now get movin’,” he said. “You’re gonna be late for your next class.”
    I took off the jacket and wadded it up, sticking it under my arm and heading toward the door. I looked around the corner and Ruben and Robert were there waiting for me.
    “Look, they’re right outside the door,” I said.
    Mr. Dubrawsky stepped out and said, “Hey, you kids run along. You’re gonna be late for class.”
    They moved into the hallway, but I knew that wasn’t the end of it. I walked quickly to the next wing and then veered to the left and into the main hallway, hoping to dodge any confrontation.
    It didn’t work. They were waiting by my locker, and when they saw me it started.
    “Hey faggot, where’s your jacket?” Ruben asked.
    Robert laughed and shouted, “The faggot with the jacket! The faggot with the
jacket!” and then said, “It’s right here,” as he pulled it away from me and spread it out so everybody could see the pink lining.
    “Hey! Look at Marshmallow’s jacket!” shouted Robert. Everybody in the hall was laughing as Ruben tried to put it on me but I pushed it away.
    “I’m not wearing that thing and you can’t make me,” I said. “Leave me alone.”
    “I don’t have to leave you alone, white b-”
    “Hey, you boys need to get to class,” said Mr. Perez, the assistant principal, as I took the jacket and stuffed it in my locker.
    “Fucker you don’t grab nothing from me,” said Robert under his breath, and then, to Mr. Perez, “Sir, he’s wearing a girl’s jacket, sir.”
    “It’s none of your business what he’s wearing,” said Mr. Perez. “You need to get to class. The bell’s fixing to ring.”
    The bullies moved down the hall, and Mr. Perez asked, “Were those kids picking on you? Tell me the truth.”
    “No,” I said. “They were just playing around.”
    He shook his head and said, “If anybody’s messing with you, you come tell me, OK?”
    I nodded and moved down the hall toward my next class. I sat through second period math in a downpour of misery about what the rest of the day would be like. The desks and the floor seemed to swallow me; I could feel everyone staring at me even though they weren’t; I didn’t hear a word the teacher said. Not that I would have, anyway. I hated math. To me, it was just another necessary evil, and I slipped away to sit by the campfire with Cabeza de Vaca and the other shipwrecked survivors. I climped the pyramids at Teotihuacan, took a swim in the Nile, and explored St. Basil's Cathedral.
    A boy behind me snapped me back to reality when he asked if he could borrow a pencil; I wheeled around and said, “No, I don’t lend pencils to fags. How do I know you’re not gonna stick it up your ass?”
    The boy, David Watson, and I had a lot in common. We both loved hunting and fishing, andwe’d talked about going to each other’s leases or going fishing sometime.   
    He glared at me and said, “Dude, all I did was ask you for a pencil.”
    “I don’t care if you asked me for a toothpick,” I said. “And stop being such a fag.”
    He let out an exasperated sigh and borrowed a pencil from someone in the next aisle. He never spoke to me after that. I kept trying to initiate conversation and he just avoided me, and I didn’t understand why until years later.
    When the bell rang, Ruben walked up to me in the hallway and said, “Hey man, we were just playing around, alright?”
    “Yeah,” said Robert, patting me hard on the back. “We were just messing around. You’re cool.”
    “OK,” I said, relieved.
    I walked down the hallway and people behind me started laughing and kicking me.
    “Stop kicking me,” I said, wheeling around to see Molly Rankin with her foot in mid-air.
    “You told me to!” she said before landing her foot hard between my legs. I went down, my books scattered, and everybody began kicking them down the hall.
    “You actually felt that?” Molly said with a laugh, her black hair waving wildly around her oval face.
    “He’s a fuckin’ pussy,” bellowed Doug Wesley, a carrot top with sadistic blue eyes who now sneered menacingly at me. He’d given me hell since seventh grade.
    I was paralyzed with disgrace. I had a massive crush on Molly. It didn’t matter that just the previous week she’d asked me for a nickel in the cafeteria and when I handed it to her she told me to put it on the table.
    “I don’t want to touch you,” she said as she picked it up.
      Nothing dissuaded me from my attraction to her. I had watched her for hours, in the lunchroom, flirting with other guys and quarreling with girls, walking to class. I knew her class schedule probably better than she did. A couple of times I’d seen her at the mall and had followed her, taking note of her every move.
    When she’d rubbed up against me and run her hand down my back and asked for help with English, I was powerless to resist her. Then as soon as I’d answered some questions for her, she’d gotten up and left like she didn’t even know me. I’d still thought she liked me; I'd imagined wrapping my arms around her and holding her close and dancing with her to the song “Easy” by the Commodores. I would feel her hair against my face and smell her perfume and then I’d kiss her and I would lose myself in the ecstasy of her sweet lips.
    I had sent her a carnation for Valentine’s Day. She’d stripped off the petals, wrote “fuck head” on the card and stuck it in a slot in my locker. This had just made me want her even more.
    Now here I was on the floor surrounded by people and lockers and the clattering of locks and the stomps of footsteps and horrifying laughter. And there was Letty with the look of pity on her face as I huddled on the floor with everyone laughing. Her cheeks flared and her jaw muscles clenched as she looked around angrily. She had just started toward me when suddenly a strong hand grabbed the collar of my shirt and I looked up to see Matt Decker who lived one street over from me. He  pulled me up and I felt him rip something off my back. He showed it to me: a big sheet of paper with the words, “Kick me I’m a bitch.”
    I looked at Letty who just looked helplessly at me for a moment. I was confused about what to feel about her seeing me like this. My status had just been elevated by Matt Decker’s intervention and yet she’d seen that someone had to rescue me. She had been about to rescue me herself.
    Everyone was still laughing, but Matt just looked at me and shook his head. He himself was also something of an outcast, being poor and unprivileged, but people left him alone because he was bigger than all of them and he kept to himself. We’d grown up together, but our friendship had been on again/off again over the years. His father was in jail on assault and drug charges, and Matt himself had recently returned from reform school. Yet he stayed out of trouble because people knew better than to mess with him, and he’d had enough hassle in his life. He stood a little over six feet tall and people had nicknamed him Saxon because he looked like a Saxon warrior with his thick bones and mane of shoulder-length white hair. Sometimes they referred to him as Matt Pecker but they never said it to his face.
    “C’mon, Kyle, let’s go find your books,” he said.
    I was almost in tears. “Don’t you fuckin’ start cryin’ on me or I’ll leave you standin’ here,” he said. 
    “You boys OK over here?” It was Mr. Perez again. I wanted to tell him but Matt shook his head.
    “It’s OK,” I said. “I just fell.”
    Mr. Perez wasn’t convinced, but he didn’t push the matter. “Alright, I don’t want to keep pushing you to get to class. The bell’s gonna ring.”
    Matt and I managed to hunt down my books, which had footprints all over them.
    “Meet me after school and we’ll walk home,” he said.
    Nobody bothered me the rest of the day, not even in science class where Ruben and Robert sat a couple of rows away from me. The teacher was taking a day off by showing a film about the dangers of using marijuana. Weed had never had an effect on me because I’d always smoked it like a cigarette – I wasn’t observant enough to see that there was a certain technique to it.
    However, the film featured  a guy teaching his girlfriend how to smoke by first drawing on the joint, holding the smoke in your lungs, and then letting it out. I sat there watching the film and thought, ‘Oh, so that’s how you do it.’
    That wasn’t the only thing on my mind. I could see Molly Rankin’s menacing face all around me, and Letty watching the whole thing. I couldn’t get Molly out of my mind and I kept  withdrawing to a quiet lake surrounded by pinewood forest. I’d been humiliated by someone with whom I was deeply infatuated, right there in front of  Letty.
    To say that Molly’s joining in the fun at my expense was hurtful would be a colossal understatement. I was so traumatized it literally made me sick. I wanted to strangle Doug for what he’d said in front of Molly and Letty, and I hated the people who’d set it up: Robert, Ruben…and my mother whom I loved dearly.
    I looked around for Letty after school but didn’t see her. Matt met me at my locker and I told him what had happened and showed him the jacket. He shook his head and said, “Kyle, if my mother told me to wear a jacket like this I’d tell her to fuck off.”
    “That’s what I’m gonna do,” I said. “She thinks just ‘cause she put all that work into it I should wear it anyway.”
    “Just throw it in the trash somewhere,” he said. “Then she can’t make you wear it.”
    “I can’t do that, she’ll kill me,” I said.
    “Tell her somebody stole it,” he said.
    I looked at the jacket, this nemesis that had created a nightmare for me – and I couldn’t ditch it. My mother had still worked on it and I couldn’t throw it away. I just wadded it up and stuck it under my arm and we walked home. It was early March, but we’d had a mild winter and it was only slightly chilly, so I really didn’t need a jacket. Matt pulled out a joint when we arrived at the field where we cut through to get home. I took a couple of drags from it but, as always, it didn’t do anything to me. The instructional film from science class earlier in the day hadn’t sunk in yet.
      When I walked through the front door my mother immediately started in on me.
    “Hi, babe,” she said with a big smile on her face. “How’s my lil babe!?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “Why don’t you ask him?”
    “How did school go?” she said, unfazed. “I bet nobody said anything about the jacket.”
    “Yes, they did,” I said. “Notice I’m not wearing it?”
    “What!?” she said. “You walked all the way home in the freezin’ cold without your jacket on?”
      “Yeah,” I said, darting to my room to get away from her caterwauling.
      “Kyle, you’re gonna catch cold if you walk around like that without anything on,” she whined as she came to my door.
    “I’ll wear my other jacket,” I said. “It’s still good.”
    “It’s full of holes and it looks shabby on you,” she said. “There’s no reason why you should wear that old thing when you’ve got a perfectly good jacket that I worked on for weeks for you.”
    “I’m not wearing it and that’s it,” I said, feeling terrible now for defending myself.
    “We’ll see about that!” she snapped. “Just wait ‘til your Daddy gets home!” My father was at someone’s house working on their car. He often made house calls.
      I felt horrible now, because I could feel my mother feeling horrible. She was making Swiss steak in the kitchen and it smelled delicious and I looked forward to dinner. It would take my mind off my misery.
    I couldn’t get Molly Rankin out of my head. I wanted to rip her throat out. I wanted to screw her brains out and hammer her teeth in all at the same time. I wanted to gouge Doug’s eyes out. I wanted to kill Ruben and Robert. I wanted to watch them bleed and beg for their lives, and I wanted to make them the bitches they’d tried to make me. I wanted to strangle my mother for making me feel bad for defending myself. I wanted to kick Mr. Dubrawsky in the balls and make him crouch on the floor.
    I lay on my bed, too numb to cry, listening to Styx sing the song “I’m OK.”
    “If I could stand beside myself/would I see me or maybe someone else/they say do your best/but don’t cause a fuss/don’t make waves be like the rest of us,” until dinner was ready.
    I came in and sat at the table. My mother had a disturbed look on her face.
    “Your mother tells me there was a problem with a jacket she fixed up for you?” my Dad said.
    “Yeah, I’m not wearin’ it, I don’t care what you say!” I said.
    “Well, now, just hold on,” he said. “Let me see it.”
    I brought it to the table and showed it to him. He frowned and looked at my mother and said, “Honey, it’s a girl’s jacket.”
    “But after all the work I put into it,” she said. “He can still wear it, can’t he?”
    “Uh, I don’t think so,” he said, handing it back to me and kind of chuckling at her.
    She wilted beneath his snickering and I resented him for making her feel bad and I was elated that he was actually backing me up, one of the few times he ever did so. I took the jacket and stuck it in my closet beneath my camping gear, hoping never to see it again. 
    I suddenly had an idea. They were in the kitchen having a heated discussion about jackets and teasing. I went into their back bedroom where my dad kept his guns, and I pulled out a .38. It was quick and easy, and I took it back to my room and rolled it up in the jacket.
    I went back to the table and dove into the Swiss steak.
    “Is it fit to eat?” asked my mother.
    “Yes,” I said consolingly, resenting my obligation to console her. “It’s delicious.”
    She ate silently and my heart raced as the gravity of what I’d just done sunk in. It almost felt like someone else was planning this and I was just an innocent bystander. I finished dinner and then withdrew to my room. I turned the music way up and my father came to the door once and told me to turn it down. I barely heard him and then someone outside of myself lowered the volume. I played the whole scene of what I had planned over in my mind, walking into first period and pulling out a pistol and suddenly everyone taking me seriously. I imagined seeing fear in Ruben’s and Robert’s eyes, their voices shaking, putting their arms up, begging me not to shoot. I’d take them out and then I’d shoot Mr. Dubrawsky for calling me Marshmallow. I didn’t know where Doug had first period, but I knew where Molly would be, and I’d go quickly to her room and finish her off, then I’d take myself out in a horrific storm of victory, going someplace where nobody could ever hurt me again. I knew I’d go to Hell, but it seemed I was going there already because I couldn’t be everything people expected me to be, and anyway at least it wouldn’t be here.     
    I lay there as darkness fell in my room, turning on the black light and staring at a fluorescent poster called “Star Gaze” that had bars of magenta and blue and red and amber radiating in zig zag patterns from the eye in the center. The colors whirled around in my head, overpowering me, shimmering, shaking, diving into me, drawing me into a vortex where nothing could touch me.
    There was a knock at the door.
    “Phone call,” said my Dad.
    I walked silently through the house, the colors of the poster still shrouding me. I  ignored my mother who sat brooding over a newspaper, and I took the phone in the kitchen.
    “Kyle?” It was Letty.
    “Yeah,” I said. She seemed far away from me now. I struggled to reach across the gulf of my agony, but I couldn’t make it. I was stranded on a piece of rock in a raging ocean.
    “Are you alright?” Letty asked.
    “Yeah, I’m OK,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I had been humiliated in front of her and I resented her for what I thought she might be thinking, that I was some poor helpless kid that needed protecting; I felt suddenly warm and endearing toward her, and then I felt violated and vulnerable and tuned her out.
    “I’m so sorry about what those boys did to you,” she said. “I told my Mom and she’s really
mad with them. She’s good friends with Ruben’s mom and she called her.”
    Great. Now I had people’s moms sticking up for me. That’s all I needed.
    I had thrown up a wall and no one was going to get through. My mind was wandering through the bright colors of my poster.
    “I wanted to be at your locker after school but I had to go with my mom to the dentist,” she said.
    I was too paralyzed to say anything.
    “You wanna come over?” she asked. “My mom just made some oatmeal cookies and you can come over and we’ll work on your math, and I really need help with English. We’re reading Romeo and Juliet.”
    I was self-conscious about helping her with Romeo and Juliet. I couldn’t keep up with the story and couldn’t remember who was Montague and who was Capulet. All she needed, though, was for me to read it to her.
    I thought she was patronizing me and I resented it; I knew she cared about me and it scared me.
    “I don’t really feel like going anywhere tonight,” I said. “Maybe some other time.”
    She was quiet a moment, then said, “Are you sure you’re OK?”
    “Yeah, I’m OK.”
    “You call me if you feel like talking, OK?” she said.
    “OK, thanks,” I said.
    I hung up and went back to my room. I felt like stone that had been smashed with a hammer.
    Letty’s phone call sent me into a whirlwind of confusion. I didn’t know what to do about her.
    As I lay there, I wished I’d gone to her house, but I was too embarrassed. I couldn’t face her now, and it hurt that the good times we shared were over.
    I thought of all the places I’d never get to see: Mt. Kilimanjaro, the Himalayas, the Great Barrier Reef, Macchu Piccu, the Amazon. I thought about how I’d never get to see Letty again either, never get to help her with reading, never study math with her again, never again taste her lips with playful kisses. I cried until my face burned, but it was not enough to dissuade me from my plan. I had to take back my pride, and this would do it. People would take me seriously once I destroyed myself and took a few with me. In some twisted way, I thought even Letty would respect me again.
    The failures and the persistent state of disaster that comprised my life began to play over and over in my head, the way they often did, but even more acutely now. My useless life came barreling down on top of me: my failures to learn mechanics from my father, my mother’s exhaustive efforts to teach me art, my music teacher’s frustrations, my lax progress in school, my total lack of athletic talent, my lack of interest in much of anything because I couldn’t focus. I wasn’t any good at anything.
    I loathed my very existence. I hated the way I looked. I hated the way I talked. I hated the way I walked, the way I dressed, the way I ate, the way I breathed – I felt like I was a contaminant of everything I touched and every person I encountered. I was ashamed of my parents, not because of who they were, but because they were related to me and therefore inferior. I hated the way I thought, the way I dreamed, the way I hoped, desired, and felt. The messages I was getting was “Don’t think, but you better  start thinking. Don’t feel, but you need to feel something. Don’t talk, but start talking.” The whole fucked up thing was a convoluted fucked up mess in my fucked up brain, and I didn’t know what to think about anything.
    Sometime in the middle of the night as sleep crept upon me I rose and turned off the black light, and I slept fitfully for a few hours.
    The next morning my mother was in a quandary about the jacket.
    “Hon, you’ve got to wear something, it’s cold out there.”
    “I am wearing something,” I said. “I’ve got that other jacket! And besides, it’s not that cold! I went outside awhile ago and I wanted to vomit when you said it was cold! It’s not cold!”
    “You did,” she said, her face falling now.
    “Yeah.”
    She nodded with resignation and said, “You know, if I didn’t know better I’d think you hated me.”
    “No, I don’t hate you!” Suddenly the volcano building up inside me exploded.  “You know what? FUCK YOU!!!”
    “Oh, Kyle!” she said, putting her hand to her mouth as tears ran down the face of the woman who’d sat me on her lap and told me stories, sang to me, fed me, read to me, laughed with me…and now didn’t give a damn about how her actions were affecting me.
    I felt guilt and rage all at the same time and jumped up off the couch and went to my room. I grabbed the old jacket with holes and stuck the pistol in one of the pockets. It was a thick quilted jacket that could easily conceal the gun. I bolted out the door and walked to Matt’s house.
    I fiddled with the pistol in my pocket, my hand shaking and running with sweat. I was angry, confused, feeling overpowered by everything around me; the gun gave me a sense of power that terrified me.
    I almost turned around and went back home, but then I remembered Molly jeering at me in the hallway and the way I’d lost face with Letty, and I continued to Matt’s house. The male ego is a very fragile and deadly thing.
    As soon as I arrived, he instantly noticed I was fiddling with something in my pocket. He reached in and pulled out the pistol and flipped out.
    “What the fuck you doin’ with a gun!” he said, glaring at me. His mother worked the early shift at a bakery so no one was around to hear him.
    “I wanna kill ‘em,” I said shakily. “I wanna kill ‘em all for what they did. And then I’m gonna kill myself.”
    Matt’s mouth dropped open and he rolled his eyes as he stepped back towards a poster with a marijuana leaf and the words, “Wanted Dead or Alive.”
    “Jesus fuckin’ Christ, Kyle,” he said. “You wanna go to jail over a couple of sorry ass greasy Meskins?”
    I winced as he said this, thinking of Letty and her brothers, but Matt was a friend and I needed him now.
    “I’m gonna shoot Mr. Dubrawsky too,” I said. “He calls me Marshmallow.”
    “You wanna shoot a man for calling you Marshmallow,” he said, nodding and glaring at me with disbelief.
    “Pffff!” he muttered, air escaping from his mouth as he shook his head slowly and looked away.
    “I don’t believe this,” he said. “Kyle, what the hell – Aah!”
      He was silent a moment longer, then he ripped into me.
    “I don’t believe this,” he said again. “Kyle, you are the biggest goddamned baby I ever met in my life! You think you have it bad? I was in a fuckin’ reform school for eight months. You know what that’s like? My sister just got knocked up from my uncle. She’s 13. My father’s in jail. He never writes me. I send him letters and I get nothing back. Nothing. You wanna know what that feels like?”
    “Lucy’s pregnant?” I said, shocked now.
    “Yeah-” He stopped a minute, looked away and then back at me and said, “Wait a minute. That’s just between you and me. Forget I even told you that.”
    This new revelation tore into me. I couldn’t hold it back any longer and I started crying.
    “I don’t wanna do this anymore,” I said. “I wanna kill myself.”
    “No, you’re not gonna kill yourself or anybody else,” he said. “You don’t have it in you. You might walk in there and wave a gun around, but you’re not gonna shoot anybody. But I guarantee you get caught with a gun at school you’re gonna wind up in juvie and they’ll punk your ass out the first day.”
    “Punk me out?” I said. “I’m not a punk, they’re punks.”
    “No,” he said, shaking his head with irritation. I didn’t understand this meaning of the word punk.
    “I’m talkin’ bout six or seven dudes cornering you in a bathroom and raping your ass.”
    I recoiled at this, feeling suddenly violated at the very suggestion, and said, “Nobody’s gonna do that to me, I’ll kick their asses.”
    “You’re gonna kick their asses?” Matt said. “Kyle, you’re taking a gun to school because you can’t even handle a couple of guys messing with you over a jacket. You think you can handle a whole gang of guys coming after you? There’s not a damn thing you can do. I saw this over and over again. It’s always the smaller kids that get taken, and you won’t be able to fight ‘em off. Even I had to watch my back. They knew better than to mess with me, but you, I know you don’t wanna hear it, but you couldn’t handle it.”
      I had fallen silent now, overwhelmed by the implications of what he was telling me. My chest heaved as I hyperventilated and my heart pounded.
    “Look,” he said. “I stuck up for you yesterday. Nobody’s gonna mess with you now.”
    “It’s Molly,” I said. “I wanted to kill her, too.”
    “No, you’re not gonna shoot Molly, I haven’t fucked her yet,” Matt said with a slight grin.
    “You’re not gonna fuck her,” I said. “She’s not like that.”
    “You fuckin’ kiddin’ me?” he said. “Why d’you think they call her Crankin’ Rankin?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. I’d heard it many times but didn’t know what it meant until now.
    “She’s fucked everybody in school,” he said.
    “Why haven’t you fucked her yet?” I said.
    “Oh, I will, I’m just takin’ my time,” he said. “I’ll even turn her on to you if you want me to.”
    “No, I’d rather puke,” I lied, resenting him now for suggesting he could get Molly before I could. He had more power, more confidence, more sexual prowess than I did, and he could easily get girls that were far beyond my reach. There was a part of me that hated him for it.
    He fiddled with the gun for a moment and then, raising it up and down, said, “Wait a minute.”
    He popped open the cylinder, stared at me for a moment, and that’s when it hit
me: I’d forgotten to load the gun.
    “Kyle, where were you when they were handing out brains?” he said, frowning and chuckling at the same time.
    “You know, you would’ve looked awfully stupid going in there like a badass and  ‘Click, click, click.’”
    “You just told me I wasn’t gonna do that, just wave the gun around,” I said.
    “You’re not gonna do either one,” he said. “Especially when you didn’t even put bullets in this thing.
      We both laughed now, and relief swept over me as I realized it would be just another miserable day at school and not the end of my life, and I still might get to see Mt. Kilimanjaro and the Amazon.
    “Here,” he said. “I’ve got something to calm you down.”
    He pulled out a joint and lit it, took a hit and handed it to me.  I now remembered the instructional video on correct pot smoking procedure in science class the previous day; I inhaled the acrid, yet fragrant smoke and held it in my lungs before letting it out. We sat there awhile, passing the joint back and forth, and I didn’t notice any change until I leaned back and a wave of euphoria hit me like a brick. I gripped the bed to steady myself, not showing my shock and my pleasure. Matt put the gun on a high shelf in his closet and said I could pick it up after school, his voice sounding hollow now.
    “Your eyes are rippin’ off bad,” he said, handing me a bottle of Visine.
    “I don’t care,” I said.
    “You always look like you’re stoned anyway,” he said.
    “I do?” I said, putting the drops in my eyes.
    “Yeah,” he said. “Everybody already thinks you’re a jelly.”
      “Then why do they keep picking on me?”
      “Because you’re an easy target,” he said. “They know you won’t fight back. I can show you a few moves if you want me to.”
    “OK,” I said.
    “Today after school,” he said   
    We walked to school and I felt a thrill roll over me as I experienced being stoned for the first time. Just two hits off a joint and I could check out. 
    The bullying didn’t stop completely. Ruben snickered at me in first period and mumbled, “So you think you’re bad now just because you’re hanging around with Matt Decker? He can’t protect you all the time.” It was more posturing now than anything else, and being stoned I could just let it go through me.
    Matt tried to show me a few moves later to defend myself but it didn’t work because I was way too uncoordinated. In any event, I didn’t have it in me. I didn’t have a combative personality.
    The hazing did die down to a tolerable level, especially when I started smoking dope in the restroom and after school with the very kids who were harassing me, but it took me a long time to get over Molly Rankin. I stayed stoned the rest of the year, and I barely squeezed through my freshman year.