M Coe - New Veronia

“I guess.” I could feel him staring at me, but I couldn’t look up from the red-smeared plate in front of me.

“All right,” he said. “I know the first day at school can be rough. Classes okay?”

I filled the air with whatever came into my head. “There are so many hard ones. I don’t know if I can… keep up with my grades. And I don’t have any classes with my friends. It’s not fair: Jay and Toshi have three classes together.” I shut up then: I hadn’t meant to say Jay’s name in front of him.

“That’s too bad,” my father said.

“I don’t know. Can I be excused?” All this attention he was giving me was starting to make me highly uncomfortable. I kept picturing him on the ground, the bear traps all around. If I didn’t get away from my dad soon, I felt like I would snap, the way the traps should have. My dad didn’t even have to do anything to provoke me; for some reason, just him sitting there made my anger flare up. I stood. “Thanks for dinner.”

“All right,” my dad said, his face the same fleshy mask as always.

Little kids relied on their parents for everything, but they didn’t know them at all. They had no idea where their parents went to school or what political party they voted or what was their favorite drink. Then, when the kids got older—when they were my age, for example—they wanted to forget all the things about their parents that they found out. For some reason, it was terrible to know that your dad owned a pair of lucky underwear, that he thought late-night TV was the best, that he once chopped up vegetables for a living, that he drank too much and could get beat up by a fifteen-year-old.

In my room, I put a CD into the player and closed my eyes. The music thrummed in the watery parts of my organs. I took out my ruler and unzipped my pants. My dick was still two little hash marks away from being three inches. When I pushed the ruler as far into my groin as it would go, I gained nine little hash marks, and when I made myself hard, I was five inches, or at a stretch, five and a quarter. This had to be average. Everyone else was probably bragging about his size, or maybe I would get bigger as I got older. Unless I was stunted, something to do with my dad not giving me enough testosterone from his side of the equation, and if that was the case, then my life was fucked.

The girls must have talked among themselves, must have decided that Toshi, Jay, and I were up to something, because on day two of the new school year, the whole female population avoided us like the plague. Or maybe it was only our imaginations, and we were already self-sabotaging our plan to host girls in New Veronia. Because we might have been a little bit scared about what would happen once we got the girls back to the triplex, to our Tony’s Mattresses; maybe we worried, at that point, we wouldn’t quite know what to do. And if we floundered, we might never be able to show our faces at school again.

“Look at them,” Jay said during lunch. We were sitting at the far table, closest to the bathrooms; this was the table that nobody wanted, and so no one would try to kick us off of it. Jay smoothed his hair, but it was too short and just popped right back up. “It’s like they have some secret network they can blacklist someone on automatically, just zip-zip, and then you can’t get pussy. Just like that.”

“Just like that,” Toshi repeated, sounding amazed.

“I got to say, bears would do this different. If they’re in heat, you know . If they want you to chase them around and stuff, you know . But us, we need some kind of plan.” Jay tapped my forehead. “What we’re doing just doesn’t work.”

“Well,” I said. “We have to talk to them, I guess. Be nice. Give them something that they want.”

“Something they can admit to wanting,” Toshi said.

Jay shook his head. “What’s that mean?”

“Girls are shallow; they follow these weird rules. Girls aren’t supposed to act like they want sex, so they need to say that they’ll come to New Veronia for something else, like to check out this thing that we built or drink wine coolers.”

“Where can we get wine coolers?” Jay said. “Bennet, you figure that out.”

“They like the strawberry flavor,” Toshi said. “Even though those things are disgusting.”

Jay doodled on a napkin and then handed it to me as if he were a police chief doling out a special assignment.

“I’m on it, sir,” I said.

This busted Jay’s straight face, and he started laughing, and for a second I felt great, like my police officer persona had been acted to perfection, until Jay said, “That sounded so gay.”

When the bell signaled the end of lunch, Toshi followed me down the hall.

“Your class is the other way,” I told him.

“I wanted to let you know something,” Toshi said.

“How did you learn all that about girls, anyway? Strawberry and shit.”

He sighed and hooked his thumbs behind the straps of his backpack. “Clues are in all the TV shows. People want to appear a different way than they actually want to act. It’s just human nature.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“But listen—I wanted you to know: yesterday, in the morning, around ten, your dad drove his truck into my dad’s truck. Right in the middle of our street. He was drunk; I mean, really flagged.”

“He was at work then,” I said; nausea pricked my guts. “And last night he made me dinner. He seemed pretty okay.”

“Somebody could have gotten hurt,” Toshi said. “It made this big dent. He shouldn’t be driving around like that, in that condition.”

“Yesterday was a work day.”

“And remember in New Veronia? When he showed up? He was drunk then, too. And when we saw him at the liquor store? Alcohol can make you really sick; it’s the third most common preventable cause of death in the country.”

I started walking towards my class, but Tosh followed. “Are you tattling on him?” I said. “Maybe you should mind your own business.” Toshi wasn’t trying to humiliate me— he’d told me this away from Jay and everyone else—but I still felt what he was saying like a twist in my gut.

Toshi said, “I only thought you should know.” Abruptly he turned and walked off, towards his next class, before I could think up a response. Watching the back of his head made me want to throw something at it, to explode his glossy hair.

In history, I snagged the desk behind Stella by telling the girl already sitting there that I had problems with my eyesight. Stella was wearing a blue t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up to show off her beautiful arms. I had to get her to talk to me, I just had to, so I asked if she could let me borrow a pencil.

“How come you never come to class prepared?” she said as she handed me the pencil.

“Hey,” I said, “I’m really sorry that my dad was bothering you on Sunday. He was… he can be a real bammer sometimes.” The frenzy of my heart was making my cheeks twitch, and I dipped my head so Stella wouldn’t notice.

“Oh, I know all about dads,” she said. “Your dad? That was nothing.”

When she turned back around, I put the end of the pencil into my mouth and chewed gently on the eraser. It was like a part of her, a nubbin of her skin against my tongue.

After school, I hurried straight home and paced the house for a while, thinking about what Toshi had said. My dad might not come home all night, or he might come home while I was asleep and leave before I got up: that had been happening often, lately. But if he was drinking instead of going to work, if he had lost his job, I needed to know now .