for being so fucking weak.
I come upon Eric at his locker after school and once he’s done putting books away and taking books out and he zips up his backpack we take up our formation again and walk to his house, and I am so goddamn tired. It’s very hot for November first, and sweating on the way home, Eric’s steps next to mine an indication that he hasn’t given in yet, the whole thing becomes clear to me. Cecelia Martin and her friends pointing at Eric talking to me, quizzing me after class about our friendship: Eric and Cecelia are in cahoots. Far from enemies, they are way older friends than me and Eric. They really are friends, unlike me and Eric. She was not in English class today, so they could not pull back the curtain on their sick, ingenious, super-labor-intensive prank in front of everyone, the nerdy kid and the quasi-Goth girl revealed to be secretly in league against the kid so awkward he does not belong anywhere. It’s either a very committed class project on trust or magical realism or The Picture of Dorian Gray, somehow, or just a gotcha, good for some cruel laughter. So: if he really wants to hold on until Monday, sleepless until the next time we have English, so he and Cecelia can unveil this thing to maximum effect, that’s fine. I can wait. There is Mountain Dew in this world.
Settling back in on Eric’s floor, I have that feeling you get when you walk into school on, say, a Wednesday: Fuck, here I am again, the same shit guaranteed by the fact that everything and everyone is obeying the same schedule and sitting in the same seats, all of us students and teachers, bored to shit. At least at school everyone’s changed clothes overnight. I am in my clothes from Halloween. So is Eric. Somehow this is evidence to me.
“Why didn’t you change before we went to school today?”
“Oh. I guess I didn’t think of it. I have to remind myself oftentimes, and this morning I guess I had other things on my mind.”
“Hmm.”
“If it’s alright with you I’m going to start in on my homework.” Compared to staring at an unsleeping kid every second when I want so badly to sleep myself, homework sounds kind of refreshing. But pulling out my notebook and doing Spanish freewriting right now seems like surrender somehow. Eric takes out our new English book,
JETHRO TULL—THICK AS A BRICK—REPRISE
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN—THE WILD, THE INNOCENT & THE E STREET SHUFFLE—COLUMBIA
My eyes are filled with words like this stacked one on top of the other. One of Eric’s record crates. I am waking up on Eric’s floor. I fell asleep on Eric’s floor. I would like to say I had a very appropriate dream in which Eric and Cecelia Martin cut me up with kitchen knives in front of our whole English class, but I didn’t, and what I did dream is disappearing fast and it had something to do with my brother and me in an empty but fully lit furniture store. It’s fully lit in Eric’s room, too, and with every detail of the furniture dream that evaporates I remember more of what I’m doing there, and I’m pissed at myself for falling asleep. (I almost always wake up pissed, from sleeping late, or not sleeping enough, and if you don’t always wake up pissed I think you’re living wrong.) I sit up and Eric is on the couch, awake, pages from the end of
There is also now a video camera on a tripod standing at one end of the couch, pointing at Eric, with its screen flipped to face him as well.
Eric notices me. “I taped myself,” he says, “so you can see.”
“What time is it?”
Eric holds up his digital alarm clock. It reads 11:00 p.m.
“I started right after you fell asleep,” Eric says. “Would you like to see it?”
Before I can respond, Eric gets up, stops the camera recording, and hits Rewind. The tape whirs while Eric goes to his closet, which is just as full of stuff as his room, and gets out a cord he uses to connect the camera to his TV. The tape finishes rewinding. Eric hits Play.
On TV, colorful magnetic fridge letters dance on a carpet, spelling out
“I completely forgot this was on here,” Eric says. “For a while I was really into stop-motion animation.” Eric hits Fast Forward and a little movie about Lego men on an island of mutants speeds by. I recognize a lot of the shattered action figures from the bin in the corner and I see how they got that way. (Stop-motion harpoons, stop- motion torpedoes, a stop-motion fall from a plateau that is probably also Eric’s kitchen table.) Then, super-fast, some credits in magnetic fridge letters then two seconds of black during which Eric hits Play, then on-screen this afternoon’s Eric is looking down the camera’s barrel, holding up the clock, which reads 4:30 p.m. Then he pans left to reveal me, curled up on the floor, eyes closed. Then he pans back, checks to make sure the angle’s okay, then carefully places the clock in the frame, sits down, and picks up
“Wait!” I say. “What’s—stop the tape.”
Eric hits Play. On TV, tears leak out of his closed eyes. His head turns away from the camera. He gets up, leaves frame, the bedroom light comes on, Eric returns, sits down again. The crying is over but his eyes are still red.
Eric hits Fast Forward and the final three hours of dark speed by and the clock gets closer to the time it is now. I think about editing tricks, stop motion. I vaguely think of Cecelia, but she is getting harder and harder to work into the equation. On-screen, Eric speaks to someone off-screen, me waking up five minutes ago. The tape ends.
“Good thing you woke up when you did,” Eric says, “or I would have had to switch tapes.”
For a second I let myself live in a world where what Eric’s said is the truth, where all the evidence that it’s true isn’t a pack of lies to be debunked. In this world my betrayal and confusion about how to feel about this kid is replaced with relief, and my heart swells and my brain practically explodes out of the front of my head at the idea that this is actually happening to me. Then I put one mental foot back in the mundane world of Eric being crazy or a liar or both, where we say “yeah, sure, okay” even in response to the smallest stuff it’s easy and low-stakes to believe. I go back and forth, feeling my heart get either huge and kid-like or small and full of poison.
“You didn’t have coffee, or anything?” I say to Eric.
Eric says: “Are we talking now?”
4
“Who else have you told? You said you’ve said it before three or four times.”
“Both my parents. You. Cecelia Martin.”
“You told
“I thought she was cool. I thought she would understand.”
“Really? What gave you that impression?”
“We like the same things. Or at least I thought we did.”
“That’s, like, a pretty lame reason to tell somebody this.”
“I know. I fully realize. But in the past year or so I’ve gotten really aggressively tired of nobody knowing. I tried to evaluate who might be a good person to tell, and I realized there was no one immediately close to me, so I guess I didn’t do a very good job.”
“Can I be honest with you? Before I decided to believe you, I was pretty much convinced that this was like, some practical joke you and Cecelia were playing on me.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Her and her friends are sort of fixated on you. And I thought maybe it was that they were fixated on you
