“How was kickball?”
“We didn’t play kickball. Stupid Paxton lied to me again. Why… why do people lie, Tony?”
“Well… people lie to get what they want.”
“Yeah, well, I’m never going to lie.”
“You lie. What about when you give Nero your vegetables under the table and Dad asks if you ate them? Hmm?”
“You can lie if it doesn’t hurt anyone!”
I was still sitting on the toilet. My feet dangled above the white and blue tiles of our bathroom. There was another knock on the door: “Hey boys,” my dad called through the door. “What are you fidends (translation: mischievous types, typically children) doing in there?”
“Dad, Vic is tinkling like a girl!”
“Shut up!”
“Vito, why you tinkling like a girl?”
“Dad!”
“It’s your mother, isn’t it?! Maanuggia (translation: typical Italian-American exclamation)—she says it’s okay to sit down to tinkle. Honey!” I could hear the contents of the medicine cabinet shake as my old man stomped down the hall. Tony was laughing so hard he almost fell off the vanity.
“I’m sorry… ha! Okay, I’m sorry, Vic. I’ll tell him you were tinkling normal.”
“Hey, Tony, can we play SEGA tonight? Maybe Streets of Rage or Dinosaurs for Hire? I’ll be the triceratops so you can be the T. Rex.”
“No. I want to go to the Geigers’ tonight.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “George told me Mr. Geiger got a new case of Stewart’s Root Beer and we can have some. But don’t tell Dad, got it?”
“Yeah, I got it.”
Mr. Geiger let us in the side door. He was tall with shiny gray hair and glasses and was always smoking cigarettes. Sometimes the smoke bothered my eyes and I would have to rinse them to relieve the burn. He was a nice man, though, and he liked how fast I was. He said he couldn’t wait until Karl and I were old enough to play football together.
We passed through the kitchen and descended the creaky steps into the basement. I could hear George swearing at the television as he slammed down the Super NES controller; Karl and George were allowed to swear in their house. George had customized the screensaver and made it say: Bow before George or @#$% you!!! on one of the computers. Karl even got in trouble at school for calling Max Cunningham an “ass” during recess. After that, Mrs. Geiger put a “swear jar” on the kitchen island and required a dollar deposit per curse word—but it didn’t work the way she wanted. Sometimes when Karl was really angry, he would stand at the island and scream “fuuuuuck!” while dunking his allowance into the jar. So Karl wouldn’t have to lose any more of his money, we started using “sock” instead.
It didn’t mean anything, really. We made it up. Sometimes Karl was a sock and sometimes I was a sock. Sometimes Ms. O’Donnell was a sock, or Mrs. Lydell. Paxton and Lenny could be socks, too. But Pierce Stone, he was the biggest sock of all.
“Hey Vic, Karl told me you guys went looking for Hell in the woods behind Glenwood,” said George, without taking his eyes off the television screen.
“Yeah, we didn’t find it.”
“No shit! You idiots didn’t actually think that Hell was behind Glenwood school, did you?”
“Pierce Stone told us it was.”
“Pierce Stone, huh? Karl’s told me about this asshole. A real asshole, right? Tony, you know about this Pierce Stone asshole?”
“Yeah, he messes with Vic a lot.”
“No he doesn’t!” I screeched.
“Yes he does. Vic, you were crying over something a couple of weeks ago. Something about the lunchbox Aunt Josephine got you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Karl!” Tony called. Karl, shirtless and sockless, hadn’t looked up from the computer screen. He was playing Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. Karl liked to play as the orcs—I always chose the human race. “You know anything about Pierce Stone?”
“Not really. Just that he’s a sock.”
“You idiots keep using that word,” said George. “It doesn’t even mean anything!”
Tony opened the fridge and pulled out four Stewart’s Root Beers with the iconic painted-on orange label and cap. “You ‘socks’ want one?”
“Wait, is this Pierce Stone asshole related to Trevor Stone?” asked George.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Oh, man. Trevor Stone is such a douche.”
“Douche?” I asked.
“Exactly. He’s a grade older than me. I heard he got head from this girl, Rachel Feinberg… or Feinstein… I don’t know, something Jewie like that, and she hated it. She said she would never do it again.”
I didn’t know what “head” was. I wasn’t an idiot; I knew it was something sexual. But as George kept going over the possible suffixes to Rachel’s surname—“Feinbaum? Feingold?”—all I could picture was a brunette jamming the crown of her skull into Trevor Stone’s crotch.
I grabbed a Stewart’s from Tony and pulled up a seat next to Karl. He was deep in an orc campaign, slaughtering a village of elves. Karl was the best at video games, and all different types, too: strategy games, one-on-one fighters, racing games. Give Karl fifteen minutes to get familiar with the game and he could compete with anyone. And he wasn’t limited to video games either. I never beat Karl at Stratego or Monopoly or Risk. I didn’t entirely understand how to play Risk, but I pretended so Karl wouldn’t think I was stupid.
I often felt stupid at Glenwood. I loved to write stories about battles and kings—like King Arthur, he was my favorite—but I didn’t really care about the other stuff. Ms. O’Donnell told my parents that I was behind in math and that I needed
