Мэтью Квик: Forgive me, Leonard Peacock

She swatted my words out of the air with her hand and said, “All ads are lies. Life doesn’t get better at all. Adulthood is hell. And everything I told you about myself was a lie too. I made everything up just to see who you were because I thought they paid you to be a spy. But the joke’s on me because you really are just a crazy, sad, underfed high school student who follows random people. That’s sick. Perverted. I’m keeping your ID and if I ever see you again I’m pressing charges and getting a restraining order.”

She stood up and glared down at me through her huge sunglasses.

“This little prick follows women into dark alleys and asks them intimate questions. He’s a true pervert. Do with him as you will,” she said loudly to everyone eating breakfast, and then her heels clicked out of the shop— POW! POW! POW! POW!

I could tell everyone was still looking at me and so I shrugged and said, “Women!” too loudly. It was supposed to be a joke to break the tension, but it didn’t work. Everyone [23]in the coffee shop was frowning.

I figured the woman was really deranged—I had simply picked a femme fatale to follow, there were surely better case studies to find, happier adults prone to sadness, and she was just an unlucky fluke—but the problem was that she sort of reminded me of Linda, who also thinks I’m a pervert.

And what the 1970s sunglasses woman had said was so mean, public, and maybe true, that I started to cry right there, which made me really SEEM like a pervert.

Not big boo-hoo tears.

I pretty much hid the fact that I was crying, but my lips trembled and my eyes got all moist before I could wipe them away with my sleeve.

“I’M NOT A FUCKING PERVERT!” I yelled at the people staring at me, although I’m not sure why.

The words just sort of shot out of my mouth.

I’M!

NOT!

A!

FUCKING!

PERVERT!

They all winced.

A few people stuck money under their utensils and left, even though they weren’t finished eating.

This huge muscle-inflated tattooed cook came out from the kitchen and said, “Why don’t you just pay your bill and leave, kid? Okay?”

Just like always I could tell I was the problem—that the coffee shop would be better off once I was no longer around—so I pulled out my wallet and handed him all my money even though we only had a coffee each, and in a normal speaking voice, I said, “I’m not a pervert.”

No one would make eye contact with me, not even the cook, who was looking at the money now, maybe to make sure it wasn’t counterfeit, which is when I realized that the truth doesn’t matter most of the time, and when people have awful ideas about your identity, that’s just the way it will stay no matter what you do.

So I didn’t wait for change.

I got the hell out of there.

I went to the park and watched the pigeons bob their heads and I felt so so lonely that I hoped someone would come along and stick a knife into my ribs just so they could have my empty wallet.

I imagined all of my blood flowing out into the snow and watching it turn a beautiful crimson color as Philadelphians walked by in a great big hurry, not even pausing to admire the beauty of red snow, let alone register the fact that a high school kid was dying right in front of their eyes.

The thought was comforting somehow and made me smile.

I also kept oscillating between wanting that crazy 1970s sunglasses woman’s mom to die a horrible painful cringe-inducing death and wanting her mom to live and start to get healthier—younger even, like the two of them might even begin aging backward all the way to childhood—even though the femme fatale probably made the entire mother-dying story up just to mess with my head. But she had to have a mother who was either dead or elderly, and so it was nice to think of them getting younger together rather than older, regardless of whether they deserved it or not.

It was a confusing day, and I felt like I was in some Bogart black-and-white picture where women are crazy and men pay hefty emotional fees for getting involved with “the fairer sex,” as Walt says.

I remember skipping four days of school after my encounter with the 1970s sunglasses woman just so Walt and I could watch good old Bogie keep things orderly in black-and-white Hollywood land.

My high school called a hundred million times before Linda checked the home answering machine [24]from NYC, and, to be fair, she actually had a driver bring her home that night and stayed with me for a day or two, because I was really fucked up—not talking and just sort of really depressed—staring at walls and pushing the heels of my hands into my eyes until they felt like they would pop.

Any normal mom would have taken me to a therapist or at least a doctor, but not Linda. I heard her talking on the phone to her French boyfriend and she actually said, “I won’t let some therapist blame me for Leo’s problems.” And that’s when I really knew I was on my own—that I couldn’t count on Linda to save me.

But somehow I pulled myself together.

I started talking again, went back to school, and an extremely relieved Linda left me alone once more.

Fashion called.

There were camisoles [25]with built-in bras to design, so I, of course, understood her need to float away to New York.

And life went on.

I walk into A.P. English halfway through the period and Mrs. Giavotella stares at me for just about seven minutes before she says, “How nice of you to join us, Mr. Peacock. See me after class.”

My A.P. English teacher looks like a cannonball. She’s short and round and has these stubby limbs that make me wonder if she can touch the top of her head. She never wears a dress or a skirt but is always in overstuffed pants that are about to explode and a huge blouse that hangs down almost to her knees, covering her belly. A beaded line of sweat perpetually sits just above her upper lip.

I nod and take my seat.

The troglodyte football player who doesn’t even belong in A.P. but just so happens to sit directly behind me—that guy knocks my Bogart hat off my head and everyone sees my new fucked-up haircut before I can get my skull covered again.

“ What the —?” this girl Kat Davis whispers, making me realize my hair looks worse than I had imagined.

Mrs. Giavotella gives me a look like she’s really worried for me all of a sudden, and I look back at her like please return to the lesson so everyone will stop looking at me because if you don’t I will pull the P-38 from my backpack and start firing away .

“Mr. Adams,” Mrs. Giavotella says to the kid behind me. “If you were Dorian Gray—if there was a picture of you that changed according to your behavior, how would that picture look right about now?”

“I didn’t knock Leonard’s hat off, if that’s what you’re implying. He knocked it off himself. I saw him do it. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Mrs. Giavotella looks at him for a second, and I can tell she believes him. Then she looks at me, like she’s wondering if I really did knock my own hat off, so I say, “Why would I knock my own hat off? What purpose would that serve?”

“Why would you interrupt my lesson by arriving late?” she says, and then gives me this lame look that’s supposed to intimidate and control me—and it probably would on any other day. But I have the P-38 in my backpack, and therefore am uncontrollable.

Mrs. Giavotella says, “So. Back to Mr. Dorian Gray.”

I don’t really listen to the class discussion, which is all about a painting that gets uglier and uglier as its subject ages and becomes more and more corrupt, but magically never ages himself at all. It sounds like an interesting book, and I probably would have read it if I weren’t so obsessed with reading Hamlet over and over again. If I weren’t going to shoot Asher Beal and kill myself this afternoon, I’d probably read The Picture of Dorian Gray next. I’ve liked everything we’ve read in Mrs. Giavotella’s class this year, even though she’s always going on and on about the bullshit A.P. exam and dangling the college-credit carrot way more than she should. It’s almost obscene.