Previous Chapter:

SINISTER

9.

My mom wanted me to have tons of friends. She’d never stated it in words, but made it clear using forced participation. During the summer she enrolled me in Tiger Sharks, the swim team at Manitou Municipal Pool, and tri-county little league. Between swim practices in the AM, baseball in the afternoon, then all the meets and games my summer vacations had been more hectic than some school years. When school was in session she mandated two after-class activities per semester, one athletic and one academic.

I’d always procrastinated on joining a club and usually wound up in whatever had an open spot. I’d been in everything from Future Business Leaders of America to Science Club. I wound up begging my mom to let me quit FBLA. It was one of the few times she relented and allowed me to bail on something. She must’ve seen how miserable it made me. I’d expected science club to be just as miserable, a room full of nerd-kids staring into microscopes and discussing algae. But the monthly meetings had little to do with anything scientific. They were all about goofing off. We cleaned up litter in the city park to be environmentalist, then hiked the trails that cut into the foothills. The club sponsored a week long camping trip in the mountains and, not having a father to take me camping, I’d relished it.

By senior year I knew almost every one of my SMCA classmates. I knew troves of the public school kids, as well. I had relationships with all of these kids, all built on homework assistance, sharing lunch tables or small talk about sports or television. But none of those kids were my friends. Not one of them was a part of me. The truth was, and sometime I felt sad about it, I had only one real friend – Garren. I felt closer to the handful of people who’d given me piano lessons than to anyone I’d been in a club with, played sports with or went to school with. I thought about all of this while I was parking the Citation and heading inside my house and, when the door slammed behind me, I smelled him. Rather, I smelled the odor of his cigarettes.

It was faint, but unmistakable. I headed upstairs and entered my room. He was kneeling on the floor, sitting on his own heels, with his back to me. Both hands were in fists and pressed to the floor. He was leaning forward and staring at the guitar. He hadn’t heard the front door slam or me pound up the stairs. He was concentrating on the battered old instrument in the casket-like case on the floor in front of him. The scene gave me a shudder.

“Garren.”

The soles of his shoes had no tread. It had worn off a long time ago, leaving slick rubber that was bare in spots, showing pieces of dull yellow plastic. It made me think of exposed bones.

“Garren, what’s up?”

If his shoes looked that bad on the outside, they must have been worn out on the inside, too. I’d never had to bear worn out shoes. Mine were replaced before the arches collapsed and the insides turned ratty. I didn’t know if such broken down shoes made walking painful, but I kind of assumed they did.

“Garren!”

His shoulder blades shot up and down as I startled him and he craned around to see me. We made eye contact for half-a-second and in that moment I thought his eyes had lost all their color. They’d gone from deep blue to an ashen grey, like jeans so worn out they needed to be thrown away. Then he moved to his side to look up at me.

“What’s up, man?”

He squinted up at me and blinked several times, like he was trying to focus. “I have a key, remember?”

My mom had told me to give him a key to our house. Before today, he’d never used it, though.

“Yeah, I know.”

“Don’t be mad at me.”

“I’m not,” I said. “Are you okay?”

“Rough morning,” he said. “I took the afternoon off.”

“You’re telling me,” I said and told him about my after class meeting with Creedy.

“I didn’t know you sucked at tense agreement. Why didn’t you tell me? You know I’m great at grammar.”

“I understand the whole subject-verb and tense thing,” I said. “I just don’t care about it.”

“Set up your mom’s typewriter,” he said, “and give me your thesis.”

He started to close the guitar case, then stopped. He left the lid up and moved the guitar out of the way. I handed him my paper. It had no red marks on it, just a big note from Creedy in capital letters, “Tenses.”

Garren took it and scanned the first page.

“Jesus, you really don’t care about tenses,” he said, “not at all. Are you sure you understand them?”

“We are talking,” I said. “That’s present tense.”

“I’ll go over it with you if you want,” he said.

I left him on the floor to get my mom’s typewriter. A corner of her bedroom was set up like an office and the red IMB Selectric took up most of her pine colored desk. I lugged the typewriter back to my room in both arms, the grey cord wrapped up like a snake in one hand. Garren had moved everything on my own desk to the floor. He moved aside so I could set the typewriter down, his eyes still on my paper.

“So where were you,” I asked. “I mean, when I came into the room and you were…”

“Just daydreaming.”

“About what?”

He lowered my thesis and looked at me over the pages. His eyes were bright again, and steady, and all the luster of that deep blue had returned.

“I need a pen,” he said. “I’ll mark up your paper and then I’ll type it for you.”

“Really?”

“I type like 64 words a minute with no errors. If I do it this’ll take twenty minutes. If you do it you’ll be at your desk all night, probably all day tomorrow, too.”

“Ha,” I said.

He was right and I was grateful. I pulled a pen from my SMCA bag and handed it to him. He sat, rolled the chair to my desk and bent over the typed pages. Then he attacked them with the pen. It was hard to say why people didn’t become friend, I thought, like why all the kids I knew were temporary. It was just as difficult to explain why people became friends. Me and Garren didn’t have much in common, at least that I saw. But here we were.

“Almost done editing,” he said. “You should get some typing paper.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said and went back to my mom’s room.

We’d found each other at the beginning of one summer vacation. I had left baseball practice on my bike and cut through the city park. He was chucking large branches into a machine that churned them into sawdust and spit it into a trailer. I thought it was very cool to be a kid and working with a dangerous machine like that. The grown-ups were on ladders, sawing dead limbs off oak trees, leaving him completely unsupervised and that made it even cooler. He’d had twigs in his hair, I remember…

“Here you go.”

He lined up two pieces of paper and fed them into the typewriter’s rollers. The tips of his fingers were a mess. One index finger had about half of its nail left. The same hand’s ring finger’s nail was red and puffed with infection. He’d been doing a lot of self-cannibalization.

“Okay, twenty minutes,” he said and started typing.

I sat on my bed. He kept his gaze on the small stack of pages to his left and never looked at the typewriter’s keys, just made it rattle and clack. The guitar sat open in the corner, its fat pick-up like an open mouth. I turned away from it. A faint speck of brown remained on my wall where my mom had slain the wasp. I grabbed clothes from my closet and went to the bathroom. When I came back wearing shorts and a tee shirt like a normal kid he’d finished the first few pages.

“Anything I can do to help?”

“You can be totally quiet,” he said.

I sat on the bed, waited and watched him. I could see Garren being a school teacher someday. He was a straight A student and never did homework. His idea of a good night was writing some fiction story or recording his thoughts in his journal. If that wasn’t the makings of a school teacher then nothing was. He’d probably end up teaching English, the subject I hated the most.

He started typing another page, then cursed and ejected it.

“Made a mistake.” He crumpled it into a ball.

“You can use the eraser cartridge,” I said.

“I want it to be perfect.”

He loaded another blank sheet. It didn’t take twenty minutes, not even with his desire for a typo free thesis. But half an hour later he took the new thesis, arranged it into a neat pile and handed it to me.

“Tell your mom I love her typewriter, okay?”

“I’ll let her know.”

“And read that over, make sure it’s perfect.”

I shook my head. “I trust you.”

He beamed back at me, my little brother with blue eyes.

“I need a cigarette,” he said. “If I don’t smoke one right now I’m gonna go crazy.”

We went outside through the back door and crossed the condominium grounds into the wooded area. He lit a smoke with a red lighter, inhaled deep and held it for a beat. Then he released the gray cloud through pursed lips.

“Thanks, man, for typing my paper.”

“You mean thanks for fixing your paper and retyping it, and no problem. Do you want to go over some grammar?’

“I’d rather eat my own toes than talk about gerunds and pronouns.”

He laughed and put the cigarette to his lips again. Smoking had been one of the first bad things we’d done together. He’d shoplifted the cigarettes and we’d gone to the city park. I’d been excited at this step into grown-up addiction. Then, in a secluded spot behind fat oak trees, we’d both lit a cigarette and inhaled. I had immediately gagged, repulsed at the harsh taste and the unnatural feel of smoke in my mouth. I’d hacked up half a lung as my body rejected the idea. Garren, on the other hand, gracefully blew out streams of smoke. He wiped a little sweat from his forehead, laughed at me and smoked his first cigarette down to the filter. “You look sick,” he’d said to me, and stretched out on the grass, content. I’d become a confirmed non-smoker that afternoon. He’d become addicted.

“You wanna stay for dinner?”

“Wish I could. Have to go work, though.”

“I’ll give you a ride.”

“We’re still rehearsing tomorrow, right? After school?”

“Definitely,” I said.

“I get paid tomorrow, too,” he said. “So we can pick up some weed and those guys you know can get us a bottle.”

“I’m definitely in need,” I said. “It’ll be a good way to kick off finals week.”

“For both of us,” he said.

“I won’t be around much, you know. After finals I’m spending some time with my dad.”

“Yeah, I gotta get my guitar out of your house before you leave. Unless your mom wants me to move in.”

My mom would’ve let him. She’d already made sure he had his own key.

“I’ll ask her,” I said, joking. “So what were you thinking about when I walked in on you?”

“Oh, just some music,” he said, looking at his cigarette. “Something I was hearing in my head, this really strange song.”

In the sunshine, filtered by thick branches overhead, his eyes looked more grey than blue, and it was a sad shade, like the sky on a day of cold rain.

“For some people,” he said, “music changes everything.”

“What do you mean?”

“You can be the ugliest guy in the world, but if you play guitar or sing in a band people like you.”

I liked Twisted Sister and the Who. Those bands had guys in them that would never be considered attractive.

“Yeah, ugly rock stars always end up dating some hot model girl and marrying her.”

“I think I want that,” he said.

“Who doesn’t want to date beautiful girls?”

“I mean the liking-me part,” he said. “I think I need it.”

A breeze picked up his hair and pulled it away from his face. He had good features, strong cheekbones and a square chin. Had he got his hair cut into something that complemented his pointed features he would’ve been a good looking kid. He was smart, too, probably the brightest kid I’d ever hung out with. He was funny and good natured and how could he not see any of this about himself? Even his weirdness, the constant journaling and the giant backpack, all of it seemed okay, maybe even endearing, because… I couldn’t explain it. Sometimes he just had no appreciation for himself. I guess on those days he was just too beaten.

“I got this crazy last-assignment in English comp,” I told him, changing the subject. “I have to answer the question, get this, does everything have a soul. Only Saint Michael’s would give seniors a bull shit, trick question like that.”

“That’s stupid,” he said. “Of course everything has a soul.”

“Oh, come on, man.”

“I’m serious.”

“So these trees, they all have souls?”

“No doubt,” Garren said. “Trees have quiet souls. They’re different than ours. Those rocks over there, they have quiet souls, too.”

“I think the whole question is to trick us into saying something that’s non-religious so that we’ll fail the class and our parents will have to pay summer tuition.”

“Probably, but the answer is still the same,” he said. “Everything has a soul.Except for…”

“What?”

“Some people,” he said. “Some people are born without them. That’s why they’re the way they are and that’s why it’s okay to kill them.”

Next Chapter: