I met Vince in high school chemistry when I asked if I could look over his shoulder on test days. Our teacher, Mr. Dorsey, was a tall, square man with a Muppet’s haircut. Right away I didn’t like him. He was the kind of teacher that needs you to know how smart he is. On the first day of school, he told us he’d turned down a “lucrative position” at PPG because teaching was “more fun.” But he didn’t seem to be having any fun. He never set anything on fire or blew anything up in the lab like chemistry teachers do on TV, and he was always frowning, especially whenever his eyes landed on me. Maybe it was because I was Goth back then: black lipstick and eyeliner, black wardrobe and nail polish, skull choker, you know the look. Or maybe it was because I kept my earbuds in during class and played my music too loud.
My parents were in the process of disentangling their lives that year and I felt like a knot of hair caught between them, like something that needed to be wrenched apart or, worst case scenario, cut out. Mostly for this reason, but also because Mr. Dorsey was a jerk, I bombed the first test. Then I saw that the quiet kid sitting in front of me got an A+. Since chemistry was hard and since my parents were no help, since I didn’t want to ask Mr. Dorsey for extra credit knowing he’d probably say “no,” or “study harder” or, god forbid, “stay after class,” and since I’d caught Vince’s eyes on me twice before, I stopped him in the hall on the day of our next test.
He was a weird kid, always fidgeting, and very particular about the way he dressed. That day he was wearing a black dress shirt, un-tucked, and pressed blue jeans. His shoes were black Converse sneakers with impeccably white laces and toe patches. I noticed that right away, the whiteness of those toe patches, like he scrubbed them clean every day when he got home from school.
“Hey Vince,” I said, catching him by the arm, “I need a favor.” I decided it best to cut right to it. He didn’t seem the sort for small talk.
Vince didn’t say anything. He just stood and stared down at those pristine white toe patches.
“Things have been bad at home ever since my dad left and I didn’t study for Dorsey’s test. I totally forgot about it.” I’d worn my lowest cut shirt, a tactic I’d learned from my mom, and I leaned in closer to him. Vince lifted his eyes, blushed. Then his gaze flitted away. I smiled and lowered my voice. “Could you do me a solidand slouch a little in your seat? Just this once?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks so much, Vince. I knew I could count on you.” I squeezed his arm and, together, we headed down the hall towards Dorsey’s classroom.
~
Mr. Dorsey’s tests were multiple choice. They were the kind you filled out with a number two pencil on a bubble sheet, so all I had to do was vary my answers slightly from Vince’s and Dorsey wouldn’t notice. After all, he didn’t even grade the tests. A machine did that.
I got an A- thanks to Vince’s considerably bad posture. After that, I chatted Vince up and he agreed to keep slouching on test days. I think he was lonely. The only other person I’d ever seen him talking to was this nerdy girl, Taylor Shoucair. Vince said she was a fellow Trekkie. He said they were going to Space Camp together that summer. At the time, I had no idea what either of those things meant.
“Cool,” I said. Then I changed the subject because I didn’t want him to figure out how clueless I was.
~
Things went smoothly until about midway through the school year. Then my father didn’t show for my birthday.
I remember sitting alone at the table while my mother paced the kitchen, leaving voicemail after voicemail, each one a degree snippier then the last. There was a sad, store-bought cake on the table before me, stabbed by sixteen pink and blue candles. I’d asked for black ones, but the message was not received. As my mother tried my father’s cell, yet again, I lit the candles to see if he would show before they burned to stumps. When the wax began to puddle my mother screamed into the phone, “You selfish asshole!”
The next morning the cake was still there at the table, untouched. I peeled a cold hard disc of pink and blue wax from its surface and dropped it in the trash. Then I took a dirty fork from the sink and dug in, stuffing my face with forkful after forkful of sugary sweetness.
It just so happened that Dorsey had scheduled one of his exams that day. When I got to his class I went ahead and copied Vince’s test without changing a single answer. I guess I just felt like nothing really mattered, and I wanted to see if that was true or not. I wanted to test my hypothesis.
~
The next day, Mr. Dorsey asked me and Vince to wait after class. Directing us to sit down, he positioned himself across from us and tossed our test sheets on the black tabletop. Then his fingers drummed across them as if in search of some ominous tune.
“In fourteen years of teaching,” Dorsey said, “I’ve never seen anything quite like this. I mean. I’ve had cheaters before, but never anything so blatant. And the strangest thing is,” he looked at each of us, “neither of you passed.”
Of course, I hadn’t expected Vince to fail the test, and this caught me off guard. But I’d learned from dealing with my parents how to hide my emotions. I gave Dorsey my best blank stare and I could tell it ticked him off because he rearranged our test sheets on the table before he went on.
“Typically, both of you are good students. And then I saw that both of you got F’s on this last test and I said to myself, that’s odd. In fact, it’s more than odd. It’s incriminating.” He paused a moment, but neither of us had anything to say.
I glanced over at Vince, who seemed even smaller than usual. He was slouched in his chair, staring down at his lap where his hands were fiddling with the frayed tip of his black canvas belt.
“So I went back and checked your answers,” Dorsey said, “and sure enough, they were exactly the same. Not a single question different.” He slapped the tabletop and Vince jumped in his seat. “What I want to know is—how long has this been going on?”
I decided to take the fall, partly because I felt bad about getting Vince in trouble, but mostly because I wanted Mr. Dorsey to call my parents. I wanted them to be forced to come to school and to sit down together in the Guidance Counselor’s office. At the time, I told myself that I wanted them to notice me. I wanted their undivided attention. And this was true, but now I know that what I really wanted was to see them back together in the same room again, even if only for a few minutes.
“All year,” I said, answering Mr. Dorsey’s question before Vince could. “I’ve been copying off of Vince’s tests all year. He didn’t know anything about it.”
Dorsey narrowed his eyes in Vince’s direction. “Is that true?”
Vince shook his head. Then, very quietly he said, “Not entirely.”
Dorsey waited. Leaning back in his chair, he pursed his lips and made an oddly contemplative face.
“Well,” he finally said.
“I’ve been letting Corey copy my tests.”
“And why on earth would you do that?”
For a minute, Vince didn’t look up from his lap. He was tugging fiercely at his canvas belt, unraveling clumps of thread that plummeted to the floor like tufts of fur shedding from a terrified cat.
“Because,” Vince said, still not looking up, “she’s nice to me.”
The truth in Vince’s voice was impossible to ignore. Even Dorsey had nothing to say to that. He sent both of us to the Assistant Principal’s office where we waited for some time, sitting next to each other in uncomfortable plastic chairs.
After a long, awkward silence, I said, “Well that went well.”
Vince let out a nervous chuckle.
I turned to him. “Did you know you were going to bomb that test?”
“I thought about telling you.” Vince shrugged apologetically. “But then I worried you’d get mad at me for not studying. So I didn’t say anything. My therapist says it’s my social anxiety that keeps me from making friends. He says I have to put myself in uncomfortable situations. I guess that’s what this is.” He laughed again. A nervous hiccup of a laugh.
I didn’t know what to say about all that. At the time, I’d never been to therapy, and I didn’t know anyone who had, but I could only assume therapy was something most people would be too embarrassed to talk about. So I liked that Vince wasn’t afraid to admit he had problems. My parents had nothing but problems, but neither of them was willing to admit it and that’s why our family was so fucked up.
Then Vince cupped a hand over his mouth and whispered, “The good news is my parents let me smoke all the weed I want, because it’s good for my anxiety. Want to come over my place after school? I’ve got some killer bud.”
~
Was I surprised to learn that Vince smoked weed? No. Not really. By then I’d asked around and learned a little more about him. Toby Bower told me that he’d been to Vince’s house and that they’d smoked weed together.
“That shit’s legit,” Toby said. “Too bad he’s such a weirdo.”
“Why?” I asked.
Toby must have heard the sharpness in my voice, because he back peddled.
“No reason,” he said. “He’s just different is all.”
What did surprise me was that neither of us got in much trouble. We got zeroes on the most recent test, but that didn’t much matter because we’d failed. I was obliged to complete an extensive lab report to make up for my months of academic misconduct, and I couldn’t receive anything higher than a C+ for the class, which wasn’t great for my GPA but was better than an F. The worst part was, neither of my parents came to school for the meeting with the Guidance Counselor. When the day came, I found myself waiting in the counselor’s office alone. In hindsight, I suppose it was stupid of me to expect a different outcome. It was clear that my parents didn’t care about academics, that they didn’t respect the school or the people who worked there and—like everyone else—didn’t expect me to amount to much of anything.
But I did go over to Vince’s house after school. Vince had his own car. Not a clunky two-toned junker like my mom’s, but a brand-new Volkswagen Jetta. Pearly white, just like his toe patches. I’ll never forget the first time I climbed into that black leather bucket seat beside him and listened to the engine purr to life. I wanted to hear him rev it. I wanted to see how fast it would go. But Vince was a careful driver. He drove slower than my grandma had when she was still alive. If I’d had my license, I would have insisted on taking the wheel. That’s how long it took for us to get from the school to his house, but the wait was worth it.
As the Jetta turned off the main road and began climbing the long driveway that switch-backed its way through the woods to Vince’s giant brick house, I realized that he was loaded. I’d never been inside a house like that before, a mansion really, and once inside I never wanted to leave. I would have done anything to stay there.
The front door gave way to a high-ceilinged foyer, which was bordered by a curving oak stairway. Upstairs, there were five bedrooms and three bathrooms. This amount of unused space seemed excessive considering the fact that Vince was an only child, but it was luxurious too. I could just move into one of these empty rooms, I remember thinking, and get my own bathroom and no one would even notice.
We went down to Vince’s basement or the “rec-room” as he referred to it. The rec-room room was furnished with a foosball table and an air hockey table, a big screen TV and Vince’s own minifridge “for pop.”
He opened a jar of nugget and packed us a bowl. He said his parents didn’t like it when he smoked inside so he showed me how to make a spoof to cut down on the smell, a useful thing that I’ve employed often in the years since. And every time I’ve made one, I’ve thought of Vince, carefully wrapping a dryer sheet over a cardboard tube, securing it with a rubber band, a shy smile on his face as he hands it to me and says, “Go ahead.”
The weed we smoked was legit. I’d smoked weed before, but it was always sour shwag that made my throat burn and barely got me high.
“Where did you get this stuff?” I asked, feeling the buzz going straight to my head.
“Levi Kress.”
“You serious?”
Everybody at school knew Levi sold the best weed. He had some secret connection that he guarded with his life, so nobody knew where he got it. It made him popular in a way, even though he was, well, Jewish. I’d always been curious about it. But I wasn’t popular, so Levi’s weed had never been an option for me. It occurred to me then that Vince wasn’t popular either.
I cocked an incredulous eyebrow. “How do you know Levi?”
“I don’t,” Vince admitted. “Not really. But when I moved here, I needed a new dealer, and I heard some whispers. So I offered to pay Levi double what everyone else was paying him. Now he gives me first dibs.”
“I thought you were shy?” I said, reassessing Vince.
“I am,” Vince said. “But in this case.” He paused and rubbed the back of his neck. “I guess I was properly motivated.”
“Uh huh.” I took another drag. Then another thought occurred to me. “Did Levi tell you where he gets this stuff?”
“I never asked.”
“That tracks.” I grinned.
“Hey.” Vince grabbed his pipe. “Don’t hog it all.”
By then we were so baked I could hardly stand. Vince led me back upstairs where we raided the overstocked pantry for munchies.
My own house was far less inviting. There was never any pop in the fridge, no pantry filled with salted nuts and bags of chips, and though there were plenty of ways to get high undisturbed, there was nothing to do once you got high except sit around and wait to get high again.
~
Vince seemed to like having me around, so I started going over to his house every day after school and staying as long as I could. Since Vince’s parents were rarely home before six p.m., we had the whole place to ourselves for at least three hours. We hung out in the rec-room mostly, playing video games or watching movies on the big screen TV. Then Vince would drive me home before my mother’s shift ended.
It was three weeks before I met his mother. Vince told me she worked in real estate. He said she sold a lot of houses around Pittsburgh, and that they used to live near the city, but his parents had wanted a quieter life. So they’d moved all the way out here to Mars (no joke, that was the name of our town), but that meant they had long commutes and always got home late.
By then, I’d started staying later and later at Vince’s house, and it was almost seven when his mother came down to the rec-room and found us engrossed in a game of air hockey. As usual, I was kicking Vince’s ass, and I’d just sunk my ninth puck when I heard a woman’s cheerful voice.
“Sweetie,” Vince’s mother said. “You didn’t tell me you had a girlfriend.”
Vince’s cheeks went all red and blotchy. “It’s not like that mom,” he said. “Corey’s just a friend.”
“Whatever you say,” his mother said, with that knowing tone adults get. Then she turned to me and extended her hand.
Vince’s mother was tall with stiff, straight hair dyed blond. Her features were sharp and small. Her eyes were hazel like Vince’s, flecked with green and gold. She wore a black blazer and black slacks with a turquoise blouse underneath. In other words, she made my mom look like a disheveled mess of a person. Her hand was soft and delicate and, as I took it, I became aware for the first time in my entire life of how unmanicured my own hands were.
~
I got home after my mother that night and she was waiting for me at our cramped kitchen table with a cigarette in her hand and a full glass of boxed wine. My mother was the sort of woman who wore tight-fitting shirts that showed way too much cleavage and seemed incapable of having a conversation that didn’t involve her saying something self-deprecating. She might draw attention to her unkempt appearance or apologize for her “poor breeding.” In my opinion, these were pathetic attempts to elicit sympathy. I could only imagine what Vince’s mother would think of her.
“You smell like pot,” she said as soon as I came in.
I was surprised she’d even bothered to say anything. Considering the amount of wine she drank and her apparent lack of interest in my grades, I found it odd that she would take notice of my growing appreciation for marijuana.
“Nice to see you too, Mom,” I said, snatching the cigarette from her hand and taking a long drag.
“So where you been?”
“A friend’s house.”
“What’s her name?”
“His name is Vince.”
My mother raised her eyebrows. “Do we need to go see Dr. Murphy?”
“It’s not like that. We’re just friends.”
“Is Vince gay?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then trust me, Corey, you’re not just friends. There’s only one thing men care about, and that’s what’s between your legs.” She stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray and added, “I’ll make an appointment.”
“Mom,” I protested.
“It’s already bad enough, Corey. The way people are talking. Can you imagine what they’d say if you got pregnant? I’d be even more of a disgrace than I already am.”
~
The Molly was my idea. I was going to need something stronger than weed if I was going to go through with it and I knew this kid, Jimmy Dougan, who said he could get us some. So I talked Vince into paying for it.
Jimmy drove a black Subaru WRX that he must have gotten used somewhere. It was a stick shift and he liked to peel out of the parking lot after school. I met him there, in the parking lot, after third period. He was playing with his lighter when I sat down next to him, and the car reeked of burnt plastic. It took me a second to realize he’d been melting a hole in the cap of a pop bottle and was fitting a metal socket into the gooey green plastic.
“You ever try a gravi?” He looked over at me and his lips curled.
I shook my head, then tucked my hair behind my ear and glanced back at the school. There was no one around.
“Want to?” He pointed down to a bucket of water between his legs. “I had to lug this fucker all the way out here from the locker room but it’s worth it. You’ll be blazed stupid till last bell.”
“Maybe some other time,” I said, trying to keep my tone flat.
Jimmy shrugged but he didn’t look at me. He was using the butt of his lighter to mold the molten green plastic around the metal socket. When he got it where he wanted it, he blew on the plastic until it hardened. It got quiet in the car. I could hear my heart in my chest. Then I heard the distant trill of the bell.
“I’m gonna be late,” I said.
“What you got next period?”
“Art class.”
Jimmy laughed. “So what?”
“I need it to boost my GPA.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy laughed harder this time. Then he looked at me sideways. “You’re serious?”
I pulled Vince’s money from my purse. “This enough?”
Jimmy took the money and counted it. Then he gave me five dollars back. “Special discount. Since you’re cute.”
“Thanks.” I put on my best fake smile.
“You sure you don’t want a hit?” He waggled the repurposed pop bottle at me. “We could go for a drive after. I know a quiet spot off Wagner Road. No one will bother us.”
“Can’t,” I said. “Art class, remember?”
Jimmy frowned. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a little baggy with four white pills inside. “Crush them up and snort ‘em,” he said. “That’s the best.”
I took the pills and nodded. Then, as I was getting out, Jimmy asked, “What’s with you and Vince anyways?”
“We’re just friends,” I said, and slammed the door.
~
We really were just friends, and we could have stayed that way. I see that now. We were both only children and lonely. We had found each other and clung on tight. And maybe, maybe if I hadn’t fucked things up, we’d still be friends today. I wish we were.
~
After school that day we went down to the rec room, like we always did, only this time I crushed the Molly up on the glass surface of Vince’s coffee table and made four white lines of powder, two for each of us. Then I handed Vince a rolled five-dollar bill. Technically, it was his money, the change left over from buying the Molly, though I hadn’t told Vince there was any. Five dollars was nothing to him, but to me it was something.
“You want to go first?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Vince said. “That shit looks dicey to me. You sure you trust this guy?”
“Come on,” I said. “It’s for real. I promise.”
“How do you know?”
I groaned. At the time, I couldn’t say for certain why Vince’s hesitation frustrated me, but now I know it was because I just wanted to get it over with. I wanted to make him happy. I wanted to make Vince my boyfriend. I figured my mother was right: Vince must like me as more than a friend. Why else would he, a kid with money, a kid who lived in a house with a rec-room and an air hockey table and everything else, hang out with a girl who died her hair black in the sink and didn’t bother to wash the dirt from under her nails because they were painted black too? He must be into me, I thought, but he was just too shy to take what he wanted. If I gave him what he wanted, then I could keep coming to his house, maybe even spend the night sometimes. And wouldn’t it be nice, to wake up in that big, clean, tastefully decorated house?
“It’s probably bogus,” Vince said. “I heard a lot of these pills are counterfeit. Made in Mexico.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“The news.”
I gave him a funny look. No one I knew paid attention to the news, not even the adults in my life.
“You think Jimmy Dougan is dealing for some Mexican drug cartel?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.
“Not directly. But who knows where he got these.”
“Jimmy says he gets them from his cousin. He says they make you feel happy, like the happiest you’ve ever felt in your life. Don’t you want to feel that way? With me?”
Vince hesitated. “I guess.”
“Please, Vince.” I took his hand in mine and squeezed it. “I could really use a lift. But I don’t want to do it alone.”
“Okay.” Vince inspected the bill between his fingers, peeling back the corner for a better look. “But we can’t use this.” Vince made a face. “It’s dirty.”
“It’s all I got,” I said, staring down at his white laces, like they’d been soaked in OxiClean the night before. “Some of us don’t have an allowance.”
Ignoring this, Vince produced a crisp twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and handed it to me. “You go first.”
I rolled the bill, bent my head to the table and snorted an entire line. When I looked up, the rec room splintered into a kaleidoscopic space. It was terrifying. For a second, I thought I was dying or coming untethered from reality. I felt like an astronaut severed from her craft, flung out into the glittering cold emptiness. But then I was overwhelmed with an intense feeling of euphoria.
“It’s legit,” I said, grinning at Vince as I handed him the rolled twenty.
Vince bent over and took a tentative snort, just a taste. He didn’t even finish his first line.
“Come on,” I said. “Take another hit. One for each nostril.”
So he did.
I did another line too. It really was the happiest I’d ever felt. But more than that. It made me feel confident too. All those insecurities hunching my shoulders, making me feel small and dirty and unwanted, just fell away. And then I was standing tall and smiling. Smiling at Vince and wondering if this was what love felt like. I’ve never been in love, not really, so whenever I think back to that day I wonder if Molly somehow hijacks the brain’s circuitry for love?
Not that I was in love with Vince. To be clear, I didn’t feel differently about him. Not at all. But I felt better about myself. I was smiling and I wasn’t hiding my teeth with my hand, and that made me feel, well it made me feel attractive.
When I saw that Vince was feeling it too, I pushed him down on the couch and straddled him before I lost my nerve. I’d never been quite that close to him before and his breath smelled antiseptic, like he rinsed his mouth a lot with Scope or Listerine. I took his hand and put it on my breast.
“What are you doing, Corey?” he asked, yanking his hand away.
“This is what you want, right?” I said, kissing him.
“I don’t…”
But then his voice trailed off and I felt him get hard beneath me.
“My mom took me to the doctor,” I told Vince as I shucked his pants and underwear. “I’m on birth control now. So I can’t get pregnant.”
He didn’t look at my body as I pulled off my pants too. But when I straddled him again his hands found my hips, so I settled down on top of him. It hurt more than I thought it would.
“Does that feel good?” I asked, trying not to show my pain.
“Yes,” Vince said, still not looking at me.
I rocked back and forth for a few minutes until I felt him cum. I remember thinking, when it was over, that it wasn’t really a big deal. I realized then that the only reason people cared so much about it was because you could get pregnant, but I couldn’t get pregnant, so it didn’t really matter.
But it must have mattered to Vince because when I looked back down at him, he was crying.
“Why did you do that?” he asked.
“I thought that’s what you wanted,” I said. “The way you look at me sometimes. I thought you wanted me.”
I know now that I didn’t have to go through with it. That I could’ve stopped. And I’m still not really sure why I did it. I think, maybe, I’d gotten it in my head that I had to go through with it, that I needed to do it so I could stay there with him. But I know there was this other part of me that wanted to do it. I knew it had to happen, sooner or later, and I wanted it to happen with Vince and not some creeper like Jimmy Dougan. Most importantly, I wanted to be in control of it when it happened. Vince was so timid and passive. I knew he could never hurt me. It didn’t occur to me until later that I could hurt him.
But I couldn’t make sense of all that at the time. Mostly because I was sixteen and confused, but also because the Molly was hitting me hard.
It made me want to dance. It made me want to do something fun. To feel alive. So I jumped to my feet, grabbed the remote and turned on the TV. I changed the channel to MTV, turned up the volume and grabbed Vince’s hand.
“Come on,” I said. “Dance with me.”
“No,” he said. “Corey. Stop.”
It was the first time he’d ever said no to me. The only time.
I muted the TV then and sat next to Vince for a long while, thinking that sooner or later he’d have to say or do something. Maybe he’d put his arm around me, or maybe he’d get up and yell at me. But he just retreated inside himself. I thought he must be having a bad trip. That’s what was happening. I changed the channel to something calming, a nature special. Then my high began to wear off and I started feeling really bad about what I’d done. I didn’t know what else to do, so I called my mom and told her to come pick me up.
When she got there, I looked back at that beautiful house before getting into our piece of shit car. Somehow I knew that I’d never be invited back, and the worst part was, that’s what made me upset. Not what I’d done to Vince, but that I’d ruined my shot at staying there with him. I’d ruined everything and now I’d be stuck going back to my own dump of a house after school where there was nothing to do and no one to talk to.
My mother made an awkward three-point turn in front of Vince’s four-car garage, pausing midway through to gawk at the house. It was two stories of beige brick, which went all the way around. Even I knew back then that brick wasn’t cheap. I’d been to a few nicer neighborhoods and most people only built the front of their houses with brick.
“This place sure is something,” my mother said. “I bet it’s nice inside.”
“Everything works,” I said, feeling a spark of anger. “And it’s clean.” Implied here were my complaints about our own house: the broken toilet and the rusty faucets that leaked. The ancient handles on the cabinets that had corroded and were now more green than brass. The piles of junk heaped in corners, and the dust, so much dust.
“You could clean something,” my mother retorted. “Or fix something yourself.”
Completing her turn, she took one last look at the house. Then she shook her head and said, “I can’t understand why anyone with that much money would choose to build a house like this all the way out here.”
“They wanted a place with land,” I said. “Vince says they have over thirty acres.”
“Good Lord,” my mother said. “What would you do with all that?”
“I think they like not having neighbors.”
It occurred to me then that my mother was just the sort of person Vince’s parents wanted to keep at a distance. And then later, when she pulled into our cracked and pitted driveway, I saw our home from their perspective, noticing things that had always been there but that had remained invisible: the large evergreen bushes intent on consuming the front porch, the peeling paint, the weeds going to seed in the yard, and the front window missing a shutter. I could see it now: our house was an eyesore.
“How long has that shutter been missing?” I asked. I was speaking more to myself than to my mother, but she misread my question as an accusation.
“I’ll tell you what. We can go to Walmart right now and buy a new one. Would that make you happy?”
I would have preferred we spend the money to fix the toilet or replace the faucet in the kitchen, but my mother was mad and her mind was set, so we went to Walmart and bought a new shutter. Then we dug the ladder my father had left out of the garage. It was a one-car garage and had formerly been reserved for his Harley, which didn’t take up much space, so there was junk everywhere. It took us nearly half an hour to unearth the ladder. Then my mother stood, doing her best to hold it steady against the house while I did my best to secure the new shutter in the fading light. Of course I’d never done anything of the sort before and it was too dark for my mother to be of much help, so it wasn’t until the next day that we realized the shutter was crooked and didn’t match the other ones, which were more gray than navy blue and several inches wider. The mismatched shutter is still there, crooked and faded, all these years later, and every time I look at it, it reminds me of Vince and of how I ruined things between us.
~
Vince wasn’t in school the next day or the day after that. When he finally came back, about a week later, he didn’t look at me. He kept averting his eyes whenever I tried to catch his attention in Dorsey’s class. Then, as soon as the bell rang, he rushed out of class without looking back. It was clear that he didn’t want to talk to me, but I couldn’t let it go. The truth was I missed him. It had only been a week and already I felt his absence. It felt like something I was falling into. Sometimes, I think I’m still falling.
After a few days of being ignored, I ambushed him in the hall between classes.
“Corey,” he said, stopping abruptly as I stepped out from behind a corner. Then he stared down at his white toe patches and waited.
If I could do it over, I would have told him that I missed him. I would have told him that he was my best friend, and that I wanted us to be that way again.
What I said was, “You’ve been avoiding me.”
He nodded but didn’t meet my eyes.
I dug my dirty nails into my palms until they hurt.
Then I heard my mother’s words coming from my mouth. I heard her wounded tone. I heard myself talking to Vince the way she spoke to my father.
“You think I’m trash, don’t you? You think you’re too good for me.”
Before he could answer, I turned and hurried down the hall. I couldn’t bear to let him see me cry.
