Now Is Not the Time to Panic(6)

I took such a deep breath. “Oh, yeah, sure. Let’s, um, let’s go to Hardee’s,” I told him. “My brother works there. He’ll give us free fries.”

And after I scrounged around my room for money, we went outside, where my shitty Honda Civic was parked in the driveway. I tried to remember what was in the cassette player, if it was cool. Maybe it wouldn’t matter to Zeke. Right now, with the sun so high in the sky, we walked side by side. We’d make art later. There was, I thought, so much time.





Three


ONLY TWO DAYS LATER, WE WERE COMPLETELY BORED OUT OF our minds. It’s weird, but things I did on my own and had no problems with, like dumping out my drawer of rolled-up socks and then trying to knock down an old My Little Pony on my dresser, felt sad and childish when another person saw me do them.

“What did you do for fun before I started coming over?” Zeke asked me, genuinely curious.

“This!” I said, holding up a sock ball, hitting Rosedust so hard that the toy skittered across the dresser and fell onto the floor.

“Maybe,” he said gently, like trying to talk someone off the edge of a cliff, “we could think of something else to do.” Everything he said, no matter how innocuous, sounded like he wanted to make out with me. I felt like maybe my anxiety around people was because I’d never kissed anyone before, and that if I just did it, I’d calm down a little, stop being so strange. But I was just too much of a prude, I guess.

I’d had friends, boys and girls, in elementary school and junior high, but it seemed like they subsequently matured in ways that my own body and brain refused to allow. They started liking sports. They started drinking and going to parties, smoking weed. They started having sex, or at least doing stuff that made me blush when I overheard them talking about it. There would be a Nancy Drew book, which I’d read four times already, hidden in my backpack, and I’d nod along while a girl I’d known since I was four years old talked about this boy I’d known since I was six trying to put his finger inside of her. No, thank you.

At the heart of it, I’d been normal, I think, with sleepovers and friends, and then slowly they’d drifted away. I’d talk to them sometimes in class, or I’d sit with people at lunch, but would realize they were talking about things they’d done over the weekend that I had no idea about. And I’d pretend that it didn’t matter, because, honestly, I didn’t want to go to the mall and look at clothes. I didn’t want to watch the boys play basketball and cheer them on. I wanted other things, but I didn’t know how to ask for them. By the time I realized I was kind of alone, that I didn’t have any real friends, my dad ended up leaving us, and I was so angry and sad and there was no one to tell. And, you know, when your dad marries his secretary and leaves your mom all alone with four kids and not much money, people get a little weird around you. So I kept it inside of me, and that weirdness and sadness vibrated all the time, and maybe I’d just been waiting for someone who wanted me.

Zeke was staring at me, smiling, no pressure, just trying to find ways to pass the time, and I finally got inspiration. I finally had something decent for him. And I laughed, this barking sound, and said, “Well, I have an idea. I don’t know if it’ll work, though. I don’t know if you’d even like it.”

“Is it drugs?” Zeke asked, wary. “I don’t want to do that.” Goddamn, we were both so twitchy, so afraid.

“What? No,” I said, happy that I wasn’t the only one who was a square. “Just come on.”

I led him to our huge garage, which had become kind of scary in its disarray, boxes of junk stacked to the ceiling, stuff my dad hadn’t bothered to take with him and my mom hadn’t thrown out. After he left us, she refused to even come out here. I showed Zeke how to navigate around the junk to a corner of the room. “This is kind of cool,” I said, having forgotten about its existence until this very afternoon. Hidden under a tarp and obscured by water skis and a ladder, there was an old Xerox copier.

“It’s broken right now,” I said, “but I thought you might want to look at it.”

“You have a photocopy machine?” he asked, confused.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.

“My brothers stole it last year,” I told him.

It was true. One morning, I woke up in my bed and was surrounded by fifty or sixty photocopies of my brothers’ butts, all taped to the walls in my room. It took me a few seconds to figure out what they were, these strange white moons, and then I screamed. The triplets ran into the room, laughing. My mom yelled up to see what was going on, but seemed to give up when none of us replied.

They told me how, the night before, they’d gone to the high school and pried open the lock to one of the storage buildings out back, packed to overflowing with old equipment. They’d seen the copier, plus dozens of boxes of toner, and even some stacks of paper, and thought it might be worth something. So they loaded it into the van they all shared and brought it home. And, drunk, they decided they’d make copies of their asses. “Things got out of hand,” Andrew admitted. “There’s like, three hundred copies of our butts.” I told them to get out of my room, and then I spent the next five minutes ripping down the photocopies, wadding them into balls, and stuffing them into my wastepaper basket. But there were too many of them, and they spilled out onto the floor, slowly opening like flowers, my brothers’ bright white asses.