virginity.
But when the little world stops spinning there is not an apology notice from Christine. There are the anticipated messages from the casino porn robots and there are also fifteen messages from Eric. None of them have subject lines and they all have images attached. I open them one by one.
Attached to the blank e-mails are pictures of Eric and Christine, Christine and Eric among her friends she knows from blogs, the college kids she knew when they were seniors in Theater Division. Cutesy artsy pictures Christine’s friends who make photo-zines have taken. Eric and Christine flash concert tickets. Christine dances with hipsters to live music in a tiny art gallery/music venue. Christine and Eric kiss in a booth at IHOP. Eric and a guy I don’t know with a scruffy beard smoke cigarettes. All the guys who aren’t Eric are like seven feet tall and have beards. He looks ridiculous, like a nerd pet they keep around to amuse them. Christine and the nerd pet kiss in a parking lot. At first I think maybe he’s accidentally sent them to me but the time stamps show they were all sent hours apart from one another, nice and intentional.
It is so out of character that for a minute I imagine one of Christine’s friends has a garage where they disassembled Eric and modified him into somebody who would do something like this. But in a world where my best friend and girlfriend start fucking, I believe there is nothing so bad that it won’t happen to me, and I believe this instantly.
I guess it is only a little bit of a surprise that people have these hidden personality explosions where they turn out to be someone entirely different than who you thought they were. When I was like ten, my mom kind of went haywire. She realized that what she’d always really wanted to do was, not be an artist exactly, but live around artists and have the sort of lack of attachment or responsibility that an artist has. She wanted to start a whole new life with those kinds of rules, or lack thereof, and so instead of moving anywhere she just started living like that in the middle of having a husband and two kids. My parents got divorced, my dad got us, and my mom drove east. She met a guy in Atlanta and they got married in Palm Springs. As a general rule my dad is not huge on knowing where we are all the time, but when my brother and I went to my mom’s wedding we had to call every half an hour and check in.
So it’s not surprising to me that people can just blow up and change or I guess reveal who they always were, it’s just disappointing that the people who stay the same are people like my brother or Cecelia Martin and the people who change or I guess peel back their facade are the people who you thought were the good ones.
I go downstairs and out into the garage to get a case of soda to put in the fridge. There’s a mark on the front of my dad’s SUV where he hit the animal on the road. There’s no blood or gore, just a big yellow stain like we hit America’s biggest bug. I don’t like to think about what angle we would’ve had to hit something at for it to leave a mark like that. And also, we hit a mammal, a pretty big one, not an insect. I think. I wasn’t paying much attention. I was in my head building a world where everything is back to normal that felt so real for a second I thought I could step into it.
In fourth period our first day back I have to run a class survey up to the office. I want it to take as long as possible. I’m in no hurry to get back to Mr. Webber’s history class because I guess he got in trouble for showing us too many movies last semester so now he’s pledged to lecture all day every day and he would clearly rather be running
“You don’t ditch class,” I say to Eric.
“I am right now,” Eric says.
“He’s being very rebellious,” Christine says. She smiles. She thinks this is all a joke.
I walk away, and Eric actually says, “That’s right, walk away.”
“Eric!” Christine says.
I actually, actively want to punch him in the face. I think about turning and running back and putting a sneaker in his stomach, and it’s confusion that keeps me from doing it.
Sex with Christine has turned him into an asshole, I think, and that actually kind of makes me smile. Or maybe it’s just hanging out with all the assholes in all the pictures I keep getting. All the muffin-hats.
That day after school Eric is waiting for me by my locker. Maybe Christine made him come apologize for being a real cock at lunch. Maybe he’s come to do that on his own.
“Hey,” Eric says.
“Hey,” I say.
He looks skinny. Skinny even for how skinny he is. Behind his glasses his eyes are retreating into his brain. There’s a scraggly sort-of mustache on his upper lip. I think maybe this is Christine’s older friends making him into one of their own. But he has the same clothes and the same backpack and the same glasses, there’s just less of him for everything to hang off of.
“So…” he says. “How do you wanna do this?”
“Do what?”
“This,” he says. “We have to have it out.”
“You mean like fight?”
“Yeah,” he says, sounding totally unsure of himself, then again, “Yeah,” like he knows he sounded like a pussy the first time.
“You’re serious.”
“It needs to happen.”
“Fucking stop it. Stop e-mailing me pictures of you and Christine. What the fuck is that about? I don’t want to know you guys. Go fool around and take pictures of each other and die.”
What’s left of Eric squares up to me. “Come on, then,” he squeaks.
“Fuck you, you fucking mutant.” And for the second time today I walk away and for the second time Eric says “Walk away” like he’s seen it in an action movie.
My life is strange and I don’t know anyone in it, except my brother, who’s still my brother, so it doesn’t surprise me when he comes in the house that night singing an Irish drinking song with Alan and it doesn’t surprise me when he comes up to my dad’s office where I’m playing a space strategy game online and shoves a wad of paper in my face, he’s just that kind of asshole, but what does surprise me is what’s on the paper. It’s the dossier of a member of the
“Tha fuck iz this?” he says in his British fuckhead accent. “Someone exploded yer faggit library all over tha droiveway, ya bastahd.”
I push him to one side and run downstairs and out the front door and when I get there, sure enough, six months of made-up universe is all over the driveway, flapping in a half-assed January wind. Steampunk Praetoreous is stuck in the rubber plants. His cyberpunk counterpart is underneath the wheel of the blue recycling bin. Paper is everywhere and I’m completely fucking done.
I’m going to go back upstairs and tell my brother I will pay him and Jake whatever Christmas money I got in various cards from various relatives to have them go to Eric’s house and push his eyes all the way back in his brain. Then I think of a better idea. Inside my junk drawer, next to porn I’ve printed off the Internet, I find the business card of that guy from my brother’s church. I take out the phone I haven’t had reason to use in a few weeks, and I dial the number on the business card.
On the third ring the guy picks up, and I remind him of who I am, and then I start talking about a boy who can’t sleep.
“I didn’t believe it either but I swear to God… err… I swear it’s true.”
“I believe you. I was ready to believe when I heard thirdhand from your brother. I was ready to believe even before then. These are interesting times. For things like your friend to occur doesn’t come as a complete surprise.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I can’t be much more specific than I’ve been. Thank you for your honesty. If you need anything from me, anything, you let me know. And I hope I can feel free to do likewise.”
“Uhm… okay.”
“Thank you, Darren.”
