Bad Kid Read online

  “Come on, David,” called my dad as he came out of the office.

  I looked over my shoulder as we left to see Chris still glaring at me, mouthing that word again and again. I wanted to punch him. I wanted to punch him really, really hard.

  In the car on the way home my dad asked me twenty questions about my girlfriend, trying to raise my spirits after what had happened. I wasn’t sure if he knew what Chris had called me. But I didn’t want to know if he did. I didn’t want to talk at all. I just wanted the summer to come so the two of us could go on our annual road trip in his Winnebago. For two weeks we’d drive through the country to different sites for my dad’s work as a fiber-optic technician. In two months I’d be in new places surrounded by new people who had no idea who I was. I couldn’t wait.

  That Saturday morning I awoke to my mother knocking at my bedroom door. My mom, Teri, was a tiny, red-haired woman from Newfoundland, Canada. Her bizarre accent, Dolly Parton–like figure, and fire-orange hair made her stick out in San Antonio like a busy, busty leprechaun.

  “Honey,” she sweetly warned, covering her eyes as the door opened. “Are you decent?”

  “Mom,” I said, rubbing my eyes, “I was only sleeping. What could I be doing at 7:30 in the morning?”

  “Well, sweetie,” she sighed, sitting on the edge of the bed, “you’re becoming a young man and I want to respect not only your privacy but also your changing body.”

  “Oh God, Mom. We’re not having a ‘talk’ now, are we? It’s so early.”

  “I just wanted to make sure you felt okay,” she said, reaching out to feel the small lump Chris Wolfe had left on my temple. “Do you want to come into work with me today?”

  “Which work?” I asked, wondering which of my single mom’s three jobs she was going to that day. “The maternity store, the arcade, or the rape crisis center?”

  Saying yes would mean spending the day with pregnant women, abused women, or Frogger.

  “Where do you think?” she smiled.

  Thirty minutes later we were at the mall, opening the giant metal gate of the Genie’s Castle arcade with Teri’s coworker Annie, a nineteen-year-old heavy-metal chick with a blond buzz cut and purple eye shadow. Annie was tall, thin, and covered in leather, like a young Brigitte Nielsen costumed for a Blade Runner sequel. In the half hour before the mall opened, as Annie chain-smoked and wiped down the machines, my mom gave me as many credits as I wanted on the music-video jukebox, which controlled the arcade’s sound track. I pulled out the crumpled list of songs I’d heard on the radio that week and proceeded to load up the machine with so many music videos that no one would be hearing their requests until well after lunchtime.

  At 10 a.m. the mall rats started pouring in: heavy-metal kids and punk weirdos with dirty mullets and filthy denim vests. As they moped around in their Dokken shirts playing Centipede and Donkey Kong, I could sense their slow-building rage at my music-video selections—Taylor Dayne, Rick Astley, Lisa Lisa, and Cult Jam. This was my music, a brand of song completely free of guitar, piano, or any organic instrumentation whatsoever—dance pop by single-named artists like Madonna, Martika, and Pebbles. Songs with high-energy choruses and backup singers who commanded the listener to “sweat,” “dance,” and “FEEL IT!” These were the tracks played during mid-’80s movie montages in which a ragtag group of inner-city youths in fingerless gloves completely renovated a roller-skating rink while break-dancing.

  In the arcade I felt alive, exuberant, and invincible. I could have stayed there for hours, shuffling my feet to the frenetic beat of Janet Jackson or Bananarama. I had endless lives and endless credits, thanks to my mom, the queen of Genie’s Castle. And I was its prince.

  By noon I was two hours into a marathon game of Joust when a zit-covered fifteen-year-old in a Guns N’ Roses cap walked up to me. I was in the zone, midreverie to Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is a Place on Earth,” when he interrupted.

  “So . . . you fuckin’ LIKE this music?”

  “Why?” I asked, wondering how he knew it was my request.

  “Fucking look at you,” he hissed, eyeing my clothes. I looked down at what I was wearing, wondering what was so wrong with it. My electric-blue cargo shorts were clean and unwrinkled. My sneakers were a bit dirty, but the laces were tied. And my hair was—not to brag—perfect. My lightly bleached bangs fell, slightly obscuring the outside of my left eye, just as I’d requested during my last hair appointment at Fantastic Sams.

  “We can all see you wiggling over here like a fairy,” he smirked, gesturing to a group of three older boys watching us from across the arcade. “You know what you are?”

  “Excuse me?” I asked, swallowing nervously at the thought of what was coming.

  “You’re a faggot.”

  I froze.

  “You don’t even like pussy,” he whispered in my face, so close I could smell the Fritos on his breath. He puckered his lips into a wrinkled kissy mouth and made wet slurping sounds as Joust alerted me that my player had died. “Are you gonna say anything, faggot?”

  I wanted to defend myself, because I wasn’t a faggot. A faggot was a guy who lisped and giggled and walked everywhere with a limp wrist. A faggot was a grown man who acted like a lady and loved flowers and dancing. Faggots were on the news at night—older men with mustaches who lived in New York and San Francisco and were getting sick.

  I wasn’t a faggot. I was a fourteen-year-old boy who had never kissed anyone, let alone a man. Maybe I’d thought about it, but I didn’t do anything about it. And if I didn’t do gay things, how could I be a gay person?

  I put my head down and slunk away as the kid yelled one last thing.

  “Your hair makes you look like a fuckin’ gaywad!”

  His friends laughed as I stormed into the office and sat down next to Annie, who was complaining about her boyfriend while cleaning one of the dozen tiny hoop earrings in her left ear.

  “Honey, what’s wrong?” my mother asked.

  “Nothing,” I snipped, noticing Annie’s snacks laid out on the office desk. “I just want some Goldfish.”

  I started to eat handfuls of the little orange crackers, as if the mass of them in my mouth would help soak up the tears in my eyes. It seemed to work. This was when I realized how hard it is to cry while you’re eating.

  “Mom, I wanna go home.”

  “Well, honey, I don’t get off for a few hours. Don’t you want to play more games?”

  My mom reached into her saggy blue uniform vest and pulled out a handful of tokens. They looked so shiny and tempting in her hand. I could listen to so many Kylie Minogue songs with those tokens.

  “I feel sick,” I pouted, unwilling to share Kylie’s “Locomotion” with the jerks out on the arcade floor. “I want to go home.”

  “I can drop him off,” Annie offered. “I get outta here at one o’clock. Right, Teri?”

  “Sure,” my mom shrugged, pushing back my bleach-blond bangs to kiss my forehead. “I sure wish you’d tell me what’s wrong.”

  An hour later I was on my way home in Annie’s dirty brown Camaro. At a red light she lit a cigarette and retouched her maroon lips in the rearview mirror.

  “So who was an asshole to you?” she yelled over the Ozzy Osbourne tune blasting from the tape deck.

  “No one,” I murmured.

  “What?!” she screamed, turning down the stereo with her free hand.

  “No one,” I repeated, staring into the distance with my arms crossed.

  “Well, someone pissed you off.”

  “Just some . . . jerk!” I yelled, punching the door.

  “There ya go!” she said, flipping up her middle finger and grinning. “Fuck ’em!”

  I hadn’t yet grasped casual profanity, and the idea of it sent me into a fit of laughter.

  “David! I’m serious,” she snapped disapprovingly as the light turned green. “The next time someone says shit to you, tell ’em to fuck off. Okay? I want you to say it!”

  “Say what?”
I asked.

  “Say, ‘Fuck off!’”

  “You want me to say . . . that?”

  “Oh, lighten up. I’m not gonna tell your mom,” she said, lighting a new cigarette off the one that was almost out. “Just fucking say it!”

  I gathered my courage as we flew down the highway, taking a long, thoughtful pause in preparation for my first attempt at swearing.

  “FUCK OFF!” I howled at the top of my lungs.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Annie, flinching in the driver’s seat. “You can bring the attitude without all the volume. Fuck!”

  “Oh. Sorry,” I muttered.

  “Don’t apologize,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I just MADE you say it, dummy.”

  “Sorry,” I said again.

  “If you apologize one more time you’re walking home,” she warned, holding out her lit Marlboro to me. “Wanna drag?”

  “Um, okay,” I mumbled, reaching for the cigarette.

  “What are you, stupid?” she said, stamping out the butt in the ashtray. “I’m fuckin’ with you. Your mother would kill me.”

  Five minutes later we pulled up to my apartment complex. I shut the car door with a feeling of accomplishment. My newfound comfort with screaming profanity would surely come in handy when fighting off the mall rats and Chris Wolfes of the world.

  As I turned from the car, Annie called me back. I leaned into the passenger window as she applied a thick layer of mascara in the rearview mirror.

  “David, you know that two dudes kissing is wrong, right?” she asked, staring at her reflection. “Like, you know that shit’s gross and against God, don’t you?”

  “Um . . .” I paused, watching her mouth make a funny shape as she opened her eyes wider for the lash wand. After a long pause I finally replied, “Yes?” as if my answer was a question.

  “Good,” she said, winking her gooey, tar-covered eyelash at me. She smiled, her nicotine-stained teeth looking jaundiced in the bright Texas sun. “See ya next weekend, kid.”

  Annie pulled away, leaving me in a thick gray cloud of exhaust. As the big, wooden Spanish Oaks Apartments sign swung in the breeze behind me, I’d never felt more confused. I shuffled into our apartment and fell back into my favorite Papasan chair. For just a moment, the familiarity of our living room tricked me into feeling okay. I was protected, surrounded by my mother’s country-craft motif: a decoupaged dresser, framed paintings of smiling, personified farm animals, and more bowls of potpourri than you could count.

  Then I caught a glimpse of my hair in the mirror above the couch. I didn’t look like the boys who skated in the parking lot behind school. And I didn’t look like one of the cool inner-city youths who break-danced in the movies I loved.

  I looked at myself and saw what everyone else was beginning to see: a faggot.

  I ran into my mother’s bathroom and pulled out a brown eyeliner pencil from her makeup case. Frantically, I pulled my bangs away from my forehead and began to drag the pencil up and down the blond strands of hair, trying to erase my ridiculous whim. In that panicked moment, I was blind to the absurdity of this temporary “fix.” I pulled the fist of hair tighter as I scribbled harder, determined to darken them. I would put this away, just like I had put away so many things before: the Donna Summer records I’d loved when I was five; the Miss Piggy puppet I used to put a full face of makeup on when I was six; the “truth lasso” I’d run around with, pretending to be Wonder Woman, when I was seven; the collection of puffy unicorn stickers I’d had when was eight; all the charcoal sketches of Madonna I’d drawn when I was ten . . .

  Slowly, as my platinum hairs became darker, I started to relax. Once the blond eventually disappeared, I felt better.

  Pop Quiz:

  A. A young Mormon missionary

  B. Tiny lesbian health inspector

  C. Baby Captain Morgan

  It’s funny how the best attempts at hiding can make you stand out more than anything.

  CHAPTER 2

  Father Figure

  Really, sweetie?” asked my mother, puzzled by the selection of drab clothes resting over my forearm. “These are the clothes you want for summer?”

  “Yup,” I replied, tossing a pile of tan slacks in front of the JCPenney cashier.

  “Well,” she said, fingering a stack of soft cotton white T-shirts, “everything is just a bit . . . dull. Don’t you think?”

  “Nope,” I answered flatly.

  “Do you think Amber will like these outfits?” she cooed with a knowing grin.

  “She’s not my girlfriend anymore,” I huffed.

  “Oh no, honey. Why didn’t you tell your mother? What happened?”

  “She broke up with me,” I huffed, grabbing the bag of clothes.

  “Oh, sweetie . . .” my mother gushed, her consoling lecture fading behind me as I stomped ahead of her through the mall.

  “Time heals all wounds,” she comforted me on the drive home. “It’s Amber’s loss, not yours.”

  But in truth, Amber hadn’t dumped me. I’d dumped her. Well, not dumped so much as avoided. In the weeks following the Chris Wolfe incident, Amber had left a dozen strawberry-scented notes in my locker, each one asking where I’d been at lunch. I read her letters each day behind the gym, where I’d taken to eating my bologna sandwich alone by an enormous, humming air-conditioning unit.

  “Are you mad at me, David?” she wrote in pastel bubbles, dotting the I in my name with a broken pink heart.

  What I couldn’t tell Amber was that I’d learned an important lesson from Chris Wolfe: stay out of the way. If no one noticed me, then no one could demean my sense of fashion, question my ball-throwing expertise, or bash my head in with encyclopedias. So in the hopes of achieving relative anonymity, I shoved my paint-splattered sneakers and Hypercolor T-shirts to the back of my closet. For the last few weeks of eighth grade I would lie low by wearing flat-front khakis and denim button-downs, no matter how boring my mother thought they were. Feeling safe required disappearing, and disappearing meant being alone.

  In the mornings I’d jump the fence and walk to campus the back way, through the empty athletics field. After school I’d linger by my locker for ten extra minutes to avoid kids chatting in the courtyard. I quickly learned how to camouflage, unlike some of my bookish, bespectacled, overweight peers, kids who actually had the audacity to participate in after-school clubs and eat their lunches out in the open. Once I disappeared, I wasn’t accosted the way they were. With all my careful planning and covert activity, I thought I was beating bullying. But really, bullying was beating me. It wasn’t the confrontation that was isolating me, but the threat of it.

  By the end of the school year I’d grown a second brain that constantly monitored my behavior: checking every pronunciation for a lispy S, reminding me not to hum Paula Abdul too loudly, and taking note of my posture at all times to ensure I wasn’t resting on my hip. When I wasn’t monitoring myself, I was monitoring everyone else, especially boys—figuring out what mimicked social cues would keep me safe until 4 p.m., when I was home safe in my bedroom, voguing.

  On the last day of school we gathered to hear our principal’s “have a nice summer” send-off. In the center of the auditorium I felt stifled, surrounded by five hundred people I’d been trying to avoid for two months. Three rows ahead sat Amber, who slowly turned her head until our eyes met. Across Amber’s back stretched the long, muscular arm of her new boyfriend, Chris Wolfe. Amber stared at me with a disappointed, vacant expression. Her eyes seemed to say, Look what you made me do, as if the pecking order of middle school had forced her to take Chris’s hand. I felt a little guilty about it, knowing I’d made her an eighth-grade widow of sorts. But mainly I felt betrayed. I was so angry at Amber that I even hated her hair, which hung limply in a messy braid that looked terrible.

  Look at what you’ve done to yourself! I wanted to scream. He’ll never treat your hair as well as I did!

  Fifteen minutes later the bell rang, signaling the end of my tenure as a
middle-school student. As I left the auditorium, I noticed Chris and his friends. He smirked at me as one of his buddies whispered in his ear. And then I heard that word again, slipping quietly from between Chris’s lips. It was impossible to pretend that it was for anyone but me. I lowered my head and moved on, reminding myself that I was only a few days away from the isolated safety of my summer road trip with my dad. Soon I’d be far away from San Antonio. And the mall. And Chris Wolfe. Soon they would all be out of the picture. And no one would call me that name ever again.

  “COCKSUCKER!” my dad screamed at the truck in his rearview mirror.

  We were somewhere in northern Alabama, only one day into our two-week road trip. But my dad’s temper had already reached a fever pitch.

  “Look at this jerk on my ass,” he sneered, gripping the steering wheel so tightly that I could see the veins in his fingers throb. Our thirty-two-foot Winnebago rocked back and forth as my father pumped the brakes, thrusting my neck repeatedly against the high-riding seatbelt. “How you like that, you son of a bitch?”

  Not at all, I wanted to answer.

  The 18-wheeler behind us screeched around us and pulled ahead. As the driver swerved into our lane and began manically pumping his brakes, I noticed the truck’s mud flaps, which bore the silhouettes of two giant-breasted women with their legs wrapped around rifles. Leonard laid on his horn and raised his middle finger. “Fuck you!”

  Mind you, the window was rolled up the entire time. So my dad was really just screaming at me. And that was the problem with my father’s fits of anger: they felt aimed at me even when I knew they weren’t. As we jerked around the highway, a pile of books spilled from the dashboard.

  “Dammit!” he yelled as they fell into my lap. “Now I’ll lose my place!”

  “It’s okay, Dad,” I said, saving the page marks in as many of them as I could. “Wow. How many are you reading now?”