Gabriel Roth - The Unknowns

For New Year’s my mom and I went to a party at the Oberfells’: grown-ups standing around drinking, listening to Bruce Hornsby and the Range, talking about whatever grown-ups talk about. Bronwen was at a high school party, probably making out with somebody. “Stacey’s going to ask Bronwen if you can go with her!” my mom had said that afternoon, but I quashed the idea, for obvious reasons. And so I wandered among the knots of chatting adults, drinking Pepsi, trying to avoid my mother and her sympathetic looks. Eventually I began hunting for a quiet place to reread X-Men issues 129 to 138, in which Marvel Girl, made omnipotent and insane by lust, destroys an entire planetary system.

Pete was in his room, identifiable by the stickers on the door: Garbage Pail Kids, skateboard companies, Ninja Turtles. He was kneeling on the floor with a curly-haired friend, surrounded by an elaborate arrangement of G.I. Joes. Pete was bigger than I remembered, and this made me feel like I was making insufficient progress, but I was glad to see him. Here was a person who might have some minimal respect for me, if only because I was older than him.

“What are you guys doing?” I said. I could imagine spending the evening playing G.I. Joe with a couple of ten-year-olds, justifying it to myself as a kind of charity work. He didn’t answer.

“Cobra 3 to Squadron Leader,” his friend said. “Preparing to execute Mission Danger Bomb.”

“Hypersquadron activated,” Pete said.

“OK, cool,” I said, and ducked out into the hallway, where a tall man in a blue blazer was saying, “So the guy says because of the soil composition, just to excavate is gonna be twenty grand, and then it’s another five to ten before anyone’s swimming.” Across the hall, unadorned, was another door: Bronwen’s. It was impossible not to slip inside.

Because what happens in a girl’s room, anyway? By what alchemy does this space incubate a child’s body and generate breasts and ovaries and beauty? These rooms have a lot of work to do, and that’s why they’re so ornately decorated, as though with the ingredients for a spell. Bronwen’s bed had a canopy of rough tulle, like a gauzy purple mist. Every inch of the opposite wall was covered with photographs: celebrities and models, friends in bathing suits or evening gowns. A collage compiled images of Bronwen and a skinny, dark-haired girl, accompanied by the legend BRONWEN AND KATIE spelled in letters clipped from magazines ransom-note style, along with the slogans, extracted from ad pages or pull quotes, WHY CAN’T I HAVE EVERYTHING I WANT? and IT’S ALL ABOUT BOYS! I looked for actual boys, but apart from Tom Cruise and the Beatles they were few and far between.

On the surfaces of the dresser and the nightstand were jewelry boxes and nail polish and hand mirrors and lipstick, more than I could believe. In the small attached bathroom I peeked at the shampoos and bath oils and skin creams, opened the cabinet to survey the contact lens solution and Q-Tips and Tampax. Everything smelled of fruit or flowers. Whenever I had thought about Bronwen over the past year, cringing embarrassment had burned away any other feeling, but here, surrounded by the paraphernalia of her self-invention, something tender began to stir. I felt as though I was backstage in the dressing room during a performance. In the bedroom closet I found the shoe tree, the nice dresses, the jackets. I tried the little top drawer of the dresser, and although I knew what was inside I was still startled by the profusion of underwear, a surprising amount of it in colors other than white. She had red underwear, gray, lots of purple. Like the bed: purple was a theme, it meant something. There were only a couple of bras — she didn’t really need bras. I listened for footsteps at the door, but I wasn’t confident I’d hear them over the party. I pulled out underpants one pair at a time, inspected the cotton panels and the soft gussets, tried to infer Bronwen’s body from their shape. I felt like the scholar-hero in the adventure movie, alone in the library at night, combing the leather-bound tomes for the clue he needs. The pair I was looking for wasn’t in this drawer, it was with Bronwen as she laughed with her friends, took sips from an older girl’s flask, positioned herself close to some boy at midnight, while I was stuck here with her underwear and her leggings and her sweet-smelling lotions, all the props she used to create the sublime fantasy of her girlhood. Though I was far from the performance, I was closer to the truth than I had ever been. And that’s when Pete Oberfell opened the door and said, “What are you doing?”

“Nothing!” I said much too loudly. “Nothing. Just looking around.” I tried to slip Bronwen’s underwear into my pocket, but it got snagged and dangled halfway out.

He peered at me narrowly. Over his shoulder, his friend strained to see what was going on.

“Are you guys done playing G.I. Joe?” I said.

“We’re in the middle,” he said suspiciously.

“All right!” I said. “I just came in here to use the bathroom. Is this it over here?”

“Yeah,” Pete said.

“Thanks,” I said, and headed into the bathroom, leaving Bronwen’s underwear drawer open behind me.

We left right after the ball dropped over Times Square. My mom had had a few drinks, and although she was a seasoned drinker she had a little trouble unlocking the car door. “So,” she said as we pulled away from Stacey and Gary’s house. “Did you have a good time?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Eric,” she said, making a left turn, “do you wish you had friends?”

I had imagined that my mother was somehow oblivious to my loneliness, that by splitting my time between school and her house and my dad’s I gave the impression of a full and busy life. Of course, we lived together in a small bungalow where I’d just spent winter break teaching myself C and reading Chris Claremont’s run on X-Men from the beginning.

“Yeah, sometimes,” I said. “But, you know, I really like programming.”

“I know,” she said. “And that’s great. But—” There were sirens, and she pulled over to let a cop car pass. The flashing lights turned her hands on the wheel red and blue. As she glanced over her shoulder and pulled out, she said, “You just don’t seem very happy.”

Graham Neale noticed me sitting at the back of the classroom and wandered over. “Hey Eric!” he said. “You have a good vacation, dude?” It was the first thing anyone had said to me since we’d arrived back at school that morning. He put a soft hand on my shoulder and squeezed. I knew this was a trap, but my heart reflexively opened a few degrees anyway.

“Pretty good,” I said, looking up at him from my chair.

“Cool, cool,” he said. “Something I wanted to ask you, OK?”

“OK,” I said.

“What’s it like to be such a loser?”

“Good one,” I said, trying to pull my shoulder away. Graham held on.

“No, I asked you a question,” he said, sounding offended. “What’s it like?” He was going to watch me squirm on the point of this unanswerable presumptive question. I stared past him at the classroom door, the fire extinguisher, the map showing the emergency evacuation route, until Mrs. Blankenship came in with a stack of copies of To Kill a Mockingbird .

As soon as class was done I hurried out of the room and down to the basement, wanting only the warm, stale air of the bathroom. I would wait out the lunch period with the comics I had slipped into my backpack that morning: hundreds of pages of anti-mutant prejudice, terrifying possible futures, and psychic struggles against mind-controlling sadists, protected by Mylar bags and stiff sheets of cardboard. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, though, the door, with its ancient wooden BOYS sign, was propped open by a yellow cone, and a heavy Mexican woman in a smock was pushing an industrial mop across the floor. From above I heard the throb of footsteps, the buzz of voices, the entire school heading toward the cafeteria over our heads. Farther down the scruffy hallway, past the huge room where cafeteria workers fed plates and trays into massive dishwashers, was the computer room. Keeping the promise I had made to myself at Wilson, I had never been inside. But things had changed, and a girlfriend was not on the horizon, and computer nerd was a more appealing identity than kid who hangs out in the toilets in the basement , barely.