Charles Benoit - You

What you’d like to do is play an online game, maybe World of Warcraft or Fallen Earth, but your computer is missing, one of your father’s brilliant motivation techniques. It seems you have to earn the right to have a computer in your room. And they think you didn’t do any homework before?

So you lie there.

You do this a lot, this lying on your bed, lights off, hands behind your head, staring up at the ceiling. It’s what you do when you think about things. Not things like school or getting a job or your future.

You do your best not to think about them at all.

What you think about are sold-out concerts and you up on the stage, or leading a ninja death squad into a shogun castle, or gun battles with alien predators, or racing stolen Ferraris through the streets of LA, a hardcore soundtrack shredding your ears.

Oh, by the way, your iPod? That’s gone too.

But mostly you think about Ashley.

Is that why you keep your hands behind your head?

So you’re lying on your bed, lights off, etc., and instead of listening to music you’re listening to your mom talking to Paige as she gets your sister ready for bed.

“I don’t wanna wear the blue dress to school tomorrow.”

“I thought it was your favorite?”

“Uh-uh. The pink one is my favorite.”

“You just wore the pink one today. You have to wear something different tomorrow.”

“Kyle wears the same shirt every day.”

Technically, she’s wrong. They may look like the same black T-shirt, but they’re different.

“That’s Kyle,” your mom says.

“I wanna be like Kyle when I grow up.”

There’s a pause-and you’re thinking, does she mean the clothes or something else, something she sees in you that no one else sees, that you don’t see, something she likes, something no one else has, something that means the world to her?

Then your mom says, “No, Paige, you do not want to be like Kyle. One in a family is enough.”

Your breathing changes first. Short, choppy breaths pulled in and out through flaring nostrils.

Next your jaw muscles lock up, then your teeth grind.

Your fists are held so tight your knuckles crack one by one.

She could have said anything.

Any damn thing.

But she said that.

To Paige.

And you’re…what?

Pissed?

Hurt?

Embarrassed?

Betrayed?

Yeah.

All of those.

Because it’s unfair?

Or…

Because it’s true?

“Oh my god, Kyle, you called. I was worried you’d forget.”

You’re standing in the darkened kitchen, leaning against the door to the garage, the telephone cord stretched across the room, trying to sound casual without being overheard. Normally you’d be up in your room with the door shut, talking on your cell phone, but that’s another thing you have to earn back. And you’re thinking, there’s no way I’d forget to call you, but what you say is, “I just remembered.”

“I’m glad. Did you get the message I left on your phone?”

And yet another reason to be pissed at your father. You tell her no, hinting at your father’s latest hobby.

She laughs. “Sounds like my mom and her stupid phone rules.”

And you laugh. You know all about stupid rules.

“Sorry I couldn’t talk when you came by. We were so busy. What were you all dressed up for?”

You tell her about the job interview at Sears, but after twenty seconds you hear her mom saying something in the background, then Ashley saying something about there still being like five whole minutes, and when she comes back with an eye-rolling “sorry,” you jump to the end. “Anyway, I gotta see him tomorrow. I think I got the job.”

“Really?” she says, and she sounds either surprised or disappointed. There’s a two-beat pause, followed by a distracted “huh,” then another pause, and the silence is roaring in your head, so you ask her how her job was because you know that will get her talking.

“Okay,” she says. Then that damn pause again, this time with a sigh.

Your stomach is starting to roll up, squeezing the air out of your lungs, your gut way ahead of your mind.

“Kyle?”

Pause.

“Yeah?”

Pause.

“I gotta ask you something.”

Pause.

“Yeah?”

Pause.

“You and me, we’re tight, right?”

Tight.

As in close?

As in intimate?

Or as in friends?

“Okay, Mom, I know !” she shouts as she tilts the phone away, not far enough really. “ Jeez . Anyway”-another sigh, the kind that says she’s waiting for her mom to leave-“I gotta talk to you about something.”

You swallow. “Yeah?”

“I’ve been thinking…lately I’ve been, like…this is so embarrassing…okay…so, like…you and me…ugh, this was so much easier just leaving you a message…I wanna tell you…”

I love you.

That’s gotta be it.

That’s what she’s going to say, you can feel it.

Okay, maybe not love, but something like love, something close enough.

And you’re hanging there, waiting for it, knowing it’s coming, and you hear a loud voice say, “Right now, young lady. You know the rule.”

Then a sigh.

“Sorry, Kyle. I gotta go.”

Two minutes later, a recorded voice tells you that it appears that there is a phone off the hook, asking you to check your extensions. You listen to the message three times before you hang up.

You blame your father for your being late for school.

For the past six months you’ve been using your cell phone as an alarm clock. You had to, since your regular alarm clock somehow threw itself against the wall one afternoon. On school days you’re always the first one out of bed, and since you’re “so damn noisy in the morning, Kyle,” no one else bothers to set an alarm.

But no cell phone, no alarm.

And this is why, fifty minutes after the bus passed by your house, you’re sitting in the front seat of your father’s Bronco as he drives you to school. He’s running late too. He hasn’t said a word to you all morning. You know he blames you and you expected to hear all about it the whole way to school, but he’s got the radio cranked up, listening to the shouting shut-up guy. His role model.

It’s eight minutes from your house to the school and you both ride in silence, but when your father pulls the Bronco up to the front of the school and you start to climb out, he finally says something to you.

“Don’t slam the damn door.”

You walk into school and start down the hall to sign in, and absolutely nothing seems different or out of the ordinary. Tomorrow, however, everyone will claim that today felt funny right from the start. And that you looked somehow different. But as you glance at your reflection as you walk past the school’s trophy case, all you see is the same old you.

So it’s Tuesday morning-a B day on the screwed-up rotation schedule. That means PE class. You’re late, but since you had to wait on your father to drive you, you have your gym stuff ready for a change, and you hit the weight room only ten minutes late.

Your gym teacher is Mr. Matlock, and he’s cool about things like this. He’d say good morning and you’d hand him the note from the office, and he’d say something like “hope you got your beauty sleep” or “no more working the graveyard shift,” and that would be it. But he’s not there and for a second you wonder if it’s not Tuesday morning on a B day after all.

“Chase.” Over by the leg press, with his square jaw, track pants, and Midlands High Cougars sweatshirt, the gym teacher waves you over with a sharp flick of his green clipboard.