Justin Taylor - Flings - Stories

I reached around for something to wipe up with, then decided to get into the shower. It was full light outside and time to start my day.

“Hey, bro,” Isaac said. “Don’t you think that braces are bullshit? Like they’re this giant scam Doc Mizzum’s running on us?”

We were at a picnic table in a thickish copse of oak, our usual spot, well off the main path and away from the road. We were sitting on the table with our feet on the bench. My teeth had come in straight — straight enough, my mom had said — so I had never had braces, and therefore hadn’t given them much thought other than to count them as one more thing that everyone else but me had in common with each other.

“When do they come off?” I asked.

“He says the end of the year, maybe.”

“Nice,” I said. “You can ride that out.”

“Yeah, unless it’s a fucking lie.”

We were quiet a minute. I took a deep breath. “Hey,” I said. “Have you ever, like, come when you’re high?”

“Huh?”

“Like if you’re smoking with a girl and she wants to… you know, or if you’re even stoned by yourself at home and you just decide to go for it.”

“Dude, I don’t know, why are we even talking about this?”

“I’m just saying if you never tried it, it’s, like, pretty cool. Different, you know?”

“I mean high’s high,” Isaac said. “Everything’s better. So what?”

“Hey,” I said, easing myself off the table and standing in the dirt before him. “Put the bowl down for a second.”

“What the hell, bro,” he said — but it wasn’t a question. He did as I asked. He put the pipe down on the table next to him, put his hands on his knees, and stared at me, waiting to see what I was going to do. I wondered what he thought I was thinking about, would have given anything to know what he saw when he looked at me. I hit him square in the center of the face with my fist and knew as soon as I made contact that I’d broken his nose, and the skin on my own knuckles. I swung again. He reeled backwards, landed flat on his back, then rolled over onto his side, half curled up, one arm protecting his face and head, the other dangling limp over the edge of the table. There was blood seeping into the wood and dripping between the slats, clotting the dirt below. I climbed onto the tabletop and stood over him and kicked him in the gut. He moaned. Blood ran into his open mouth and I could hear him swallowing it. A crimson bubble appeared between his lips, grew large and thin like chewing gum right before it pops. I wanted him to piss himself but as near as I could tell he hadn’t.

I took everything he had, even his pager. As I clipped it to the waistband of my shorts I reminded myself that he was the one who should have gotten sick. He shouldn’t have been alive to suffer this. I thought of Mr. and Mrs. Adelman: one son dead and the other this poseur delinquent, this waste. I tried to imagine the chasm between the life they’d planned and the one they were actually living.

“Why are you crying?” Isaac asked me. I could hear in his voice what it was costing him to get each word out. I kicked him in the stomach again. And then I ran away.

Isaac didn’t come back to camp, but he didn’t rat me out either. After all, what could he have possibly said that wouldn’t have gotten him into trouble, too? According to Alana, who heard it through the family, he said he’d been jumped by some punk rock kids.

We were down in the culvert under the road again, for what was probably the last time. Camp was ending. Her boyfriend was coming to visit. He’d be there a week; then they were driving back up to school together. She had her shirt off but her bra on and wanted to know if I could hook her up with some pot. “I know it’s a kind of fucked-up thing to ask, but it would make him super happy if we had some and you’re like the only person I know with a steady connect. I’ll pay you for it, obviously.”

“I don’t want your money,” I said. It was almost true. I gave her the last of what I’d taken from Isaac — sixty, maybe seventy bucks’ worth.

“Wow, holy shit, thanks.” She opened her purse and tucked the baggie away somewhere inside, then zipped it shut. She took her bra off, folded it, laid it on top of the purse. “God,” she said. “What a funny summer this turned out to be.”

The summer ended. I started buying my pot from Kenny Beckstein, a hippie kid who could also get mushrooms and LSD. I figured out that half a green gel tab was the perfect dose: you could count on an interesting day but also on being basically sober enough to drive home when the last bell rang. For winter vacation, I bought five tabs to last me two weeks. But then I woke up on Christmas morning with this idea in my head that I should take the remaining three all at once. For Jews Christmas is like this total blank day: no school and parents don’t have work, and you can’t go out because everything is closed except the movies and the movies are mobbed.

I loaded my pockets with clementines and grabbed my Discman, thinking I’d take a walk around the neighborhood. I thought about going to my spot under the road, but whenever I went there now I thought about Alana, who was away at school, or maybe home for winter break — she never responded to my IMs anymore so I didn’t know what was up with her — and I didn’t want to think about all that, so instead I turned the Discman volume up as far as it would go and walked right past the embankment on the street that was my old spot’s roof, my shitty headphones shrieking, the noise like green fire burning my mind clean, my heart beating in time with the propulsive drumming or maybe my own feet on the pavement; I was running and the clementines bonked against my knees through my cargo pockets and I hoped they wouldn’t burst and the Discman was skipping and I couldn’t find a good way to hold it where it wouldn’t skip but I couldn’t stop running, sensed the ground falling away behind me, and then the headphone cord slipped out of the jack and there was this rushing silence like a tidal wave and the loose cord was flying around and whipping me as I wove through the neighborhood, throwing the Discman down and not hearing it shatter — it had either landed in grass or fallen into the nothingness — but I didn’t — couldn’t — look back to see, focused on getting the headphones off, dropped them, too, and kept running until I came to the elementary school, where I shimmied up a drain pipe and swung myself over an eave onto the lowest point of the peaked roof of the library, where I lay flat on my back and felt sick in my stomach and tried to catch my breath.

The whole sky was alive with pale phantoms, metamorphic clouds like wax bubbles in lava lamps. When I had my breath again I crawled to the top on my hands and knees and belly. It was a fairly easy grade, no worse than the embankment had been, but I had to go slowly, because my knees and fingers wanted to pay attention to every subtle contour in the tiles; my mind flooded with a trillion fragments of worthless glittering information, every stray kernel of grit lit up my skin.

I reached the apex. It was the view that, as children, we’d always imagined having. I could see all the school’s outbuildings, its PE field and basketball courts, and big chunks of our neighborhood — the new overpass by the road to the mall. I thought I glimpsed the lake my house was on, but then realized that I wasn’t looking in the direction my house was in, so it must have been some other lake, or else only in my head.

Isaac was on the basketball court shooting foul shots by himself, and I felt as if I’d known he was there since I got to the school, that perhaps it was even why I had come. What I mean is that this was one of those times when learning something felt like remembering it. He would stand at the line, dribble, shoot, sink it, chase the ball down, then make his way back to the line, doing dodges and head fakes and spin moves as though outmatching an invisible defender. The basketball was a comet and when he moved his body became one, too. If he looked up, I wondered, would he see me? The angle was against him, and I had the sun at my back.