Susan Hinton - Rumble Fish

“Did you know I got expelled from school?” the Motorcycle Boy said out of the clear blue sky.

“How come?” I started to sit up, and changed my mind. They were always threatening to expel me. They’d suspended me for carrying that knife. But the Motorcycle Boy never gave them any trouble. I talked to a guy in one of his classes, once. He said the Motorcycle Boy just sat there and never gave them any trouble, except that a couple of the teachers couldn’t stand for him to stare at them.

“How come you got expelled?” I asked.

“Perfect tests.”

You could always feel the laughter around him, just under the surface, but this time it came to the top and he grinned. It was a flash, like lightning, far off.

“I handed in perfect semester tests.” He shook his head. “Man, I can understand that. A tough district school like that, they got enough to put up with.”

I was surprised. I don’t surprise easy. “But that ain’t fair,” I said finally.

“When the hell did you start expecting anything to be fair?” he asked. He didn’t sound bitter, only a little bit curious.

“Be back in a while,” he said, getting to his feet.

“I forgot he was still in school,” Steve said after he left. “He looks so old, I forget he’s just seventeen.”

“That’s pretty old.”

“Yeah, but he looks really old, like twenty-one or something.”

I didn’t say anything. I got to thinking — when the Motorcycle Boy was fourteen, that had seemed old. When he was fourteen, like me, he could buy beer. They quit asking for his ID at fourteen. He was president of the Packers then, too. Older guys, eighteen years old, would do anything he said. I thought it would be the same way for me. I thought I would be really big-time, junior high and fourteen. I thought it would be really neat, being that old — but whenever I got to where he had been, nothing was changed except he’d gone further on. It should of been the same way for me.

“Steve,” I said, “bring me the old man’s shavin’ mirror. It’s over there by the sink.”

When he handed it to me I studied the way I looked.

“We look just like each other,” I said.

“Who?”

“Me an’ the Motorcycle Boy.”

“Naw.”

“Yeah, we do.”

We had the same color of hair, an odd shade of dark red, like black-cherry pop. I’ve never seen anybody else with hair that color. Our eyes were the same, the color of a Hershey bar. He was six foot one, but I was getting there.

“Well, what’s the difference?” I said finally. I knew there was a difference. People looked at him, and stopped, and looked again. He looked like a panther or something. Me, I just looked like a tough kid, too big for my age.

“Well,” Steve said — I liked that kid, he’d think about things—“the Motorcycle Boy … I don’t know. You can never tell what he’s thinking. But you can tell exactly what you’re thinking.”

“No kiddin’?” I said, looking in the mirror. It had to be something more than that.

“Rusty-James,” Steve said, “I gotta go home. If they find out I’m gone, I’m gonna get killed, man. Killed.”

“Aw, stick around awhile.” I was scared he would go. I can’t stand being by myself. That is the only thing I am honest-to-God scared of. If nobody was at home, I would stay up all night, out on the streets where there was some people. I didn’t mind being cut up. I just couldn’t stay there by myself and I wasn’t too sure I could walk.

Steve shifted around, uneasy-like. He was one of the few people who knew about that hang-up. I don’t go around telling people.

“Just for a little bit,” I told him. “The old man oughta be back pretty soon.”

“Okay,” he said finally. He sat down where the Motorcycle Boy had been sitting. After a while I was kind of dozing off and on. It seemed like I went through the whole fight again in slow motion. I knew I was sort of asleep, but I couldn’t stop dreaming.

“I never thought he’d go clear to the ocean,” I said to Steve. But Steve wasn’t there. The Motorcycle Boy was there, reading a book. He always read books. I’d thought when I got older it’d be easy for me to read books, too, but I knew by now it never would.

It was different when the Motorcycle Boy read books, different from Steve. I don’t know why.

The old man was home, snoring away on the mattress. I wondered who’d gotten home first. I couldn’t tell what time it was. The lights were still on. I can’t tell what time it is when I sleep with the lights on.

“I thought you was gone for good,” I said to him.

“Not me.” He didn’t look up from his page, and for a second I thought I was still dreaming. “I get homesick.”

I made a list in my head of people I liked. I do that a lot. It makes me feel good to think of people I like — not so alone. I wondered if I loved anybody. Patty, for sure. The Motorcycle Boy. My father, sort of. Steve, sort of. Then I thought of people I thought I could really count on, and couldn’t come up with anybody, but it wasn’t as depressing as it sounds.

I was so glad the Motorcycle Boy came home. He was the coolest person in the whole world. Even if he hadn’t been my brother he would have been the coolest person in the whole world.

And I was going to be just like him.

I went to school the next day. I wasn’t feeling too hot and I was bleeding off and on, but I usually go to school if I can. I see all my friends at school.

I got there late and had to go get a late pass and ended up missing math. So I didn’t know Steve was absent till lunch and he didn’t show up. I asked around about him — Jeannie Martin told me he didn’t come to school because his mother had a stroke or something. I worried about that awhile. I hoped it wasn’t him sneaking out of the house that give her the stroke. His parents were kind of weird. They never let him do anything.

Jeannie Martin wasn’t too thrilled to talk to me. She liked Steve. Poor kid. He wouldn’t believe that her tipping his chair over in English meant she liked him. He was still funny about girls. And him fourteen, too! Anyway, she liked him and didn’t like me because she thought I’d turn him into a hood. Fat chance. I’d known him since I don’t remember when, and nobody thought he was a hood. Try and tell her that.

So I went to the basement and played poker with B.J. and Smokey and lost fifty cents.

“You guys must cheat,” I told them. “I can’t have rotten luck all the time.”

B.J. grinned at me and said, “Naw, you’re just a lousy poker player, Rusty-James.”

“I ain’t either.”

“Yeah, you are. Every time you get a good hand, we can tell it. Every time you get a bad hand, we can tell. You ain’t gonna earn your livin’ gamblin’, man.”

“Don’t give me that. Them cards was marked.” I knew they weren’t, but I didn’t believe that garbage B.J. was giving me. He just wanted to crow about winning.

In gym I just stood around watching basketball practice. I wasn’t about to do any basketball. Coach Ryan finally asked me why, and I said I didn’t feel like it. I thought I could leave it at that. Coach Ryan was all the time trying to be friends with me. He let me get away with murder. It was like he’d be a big shot, being friends with me, like he owned a vicious dog or something.

“Rusty-James,” he said, after looking around, making sure nobody could hear us. “Want to earn a quick five bucks?”

I just looked at him. You never know.

“Price has been giving me a lot of trouble these days.”

“Yeah,” I said. Don Price was a smart alec. Real mouthy. I’m mouthy, too, but I don’t mean nothing by it. He was mouthy just to get on people’s nerves. A real obnoxious kid.