The Other Side(79)

All the praying didn’t help. She died and my pops didn’t change. He stole a car at gunpoint, got caught, and went to jail instead. And I never stepped inside a church again. What’s the point? There’s no way her good can rub off now. It’s gone.

Losing my pops changed me too. It’s not like he died, but sometimes I think he may as well have. He doesn’t want me to visit him. The first few months I wrote him letters. Dozens of letters. He didn’t write back. I went from being a dick to being a reckless dick. My pops made me live with my mom’s drunk brother because there was nowhere else for me to go. I drank. I did drugs. I picked the worst kids at my new school to hang out with. I shoplifted. I vandalized. Basically, I did everything I could to try to forget how alone I was.

Here’s something I’ll never admit out loud—I’m scared. Of a lot of stuff. I’m scared that I’ll always be alone. I’m scared that this is as good as it gets. Hanging around with friends who aren’t really friends and make fun of me behind my back. And sometimes to my face. I pretend not to let it bother me when they make cracks about my weight, but the fat jokes get old. I’ve heard them all because kids started telling them in kindergarten. That was a long time ago. It feels even longer when you’re the butt of the joke. Every joke. I’ve never had a girlfriend, never kissed a girl, never even had a girl look at me and smile the way they do when they have a crush.

On someone.

Who will never be me.

Being alone sucks.

But today something changed.

Changed me.

Toby stood up for me.

He took the fall when I stole those cigarettes.

Because he didn’t want me to get in trouble.

For someone with family and friends, it may seem small, but when you don’t have either it changes you. For a minute, it felt like my mom was back. Like someone had my back.

I don’t know why I steal. I guess because I figure why not? It’s not like I’m going to graduate, or find a decent job, or find a good girl, get married, and buy into the house and white picket fence dream. That shit only happens in movies. In real life, in my neighborhood, people scrape by with crappy, minimum wage jobs if they’re honest, and crappy, maximum risks “jobs” if they aren’t. They hook-up because they’re horny and desperate, and then fight, lie, and pray on their knees if they’re Catholic, until one of them leaves, or dies, or goes to jail.

Then the cycle repeats.

But then Toby goes and saves me from myself and I’m sitting here in my room at twenty past two in the morning rethinking some things.

Here’s another thing I would never admit out loud—I want to be like Toby. The first week I lived with Johnny, Toby annoyed the hell out of me; I think, because we’re so different from each other. But the longer I shared an apartment with him and watched him, I slowly started to respect him. I didn’t want to at first because that word is hard for me—respect. It gets stuck in my throat like it doesn’t belong, maybe because my pops always said, “You will respect me,” in our house. The more he said it, the less my mom and I did. If we ever even did to begin with.

But Toby is different. He doesn’t demand it. He moves through this house, he moves through the neighborhood, quietly, but he’s watching. He’s always watching. For someone he can help. I’ve seen it. Because I watch him when he thinks I’m not. He helps, sometimes it’s something small and sometimes it’s something big that will change someone’s life.

Not his own, someone else’s.

He’s smart. He always knows the right words to use that make him sound older and like maybe we didn’t grow up in the same neighborhood, even though I know we did. He can draw, and I mean draw. Draw like people who have so much bottled up inside them that they have to let it out onto paper or it will start a fire inside and burn them alive. Then when it’s on paper, people looking at it can feel all the feelings that created it and pay big money for it so they can get that high any time they want because it’s theirs now. A little piece of him is theirs. To feed off of when they need a fix. He could be that guy someday.

I get it. I get wanting to feel what he feels. Because it’s intense. Intense like I’ve never known intense. I see the way he looks at people, at things, at situations—like his life depends on it—and the fact that it’s all done in silence most of the time only amps it up. Most people don’t notice because they think he’s kind of an asshole. It takes a dick to know a dick—he’s not a dick. He just wants people to think he is.

I see him.

So I’m lying in bed, staring out of the dirty window at the roof of the house next door, thinking about how much I owe Toby for this afternoon. I would’ve gotten caught. I would’ve gone to juvie. I would’ve stayed there until I’m eighteen. That’s a long time. I like to think I’d be tough and handle it okay, but deep down I know I wouldn’t. I can’t even watch Sid and Nancy without crying. I’m soft, that’s what my pops always said and he sounded really, really disappointed when he did. I guess he’s right. And soft wouldn’t do well locked up with kids who aren’t.

I’m also thinking about the fact that not only did Toby take the fall for what I did, but he didn’t tell Johnny the truth. He could’ve ratted me out when the cop brought him home.

But he didn’t.