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  Kylee’s sitting on the front step of her parent’s house smoking a cigarette and letting the hot, bright sun bounce off her cool Ray-Bans. She’s wearing a tight white T-shirt, denim cutoffs, and huge hoop earrings that I’m ready to jump through at her request. She doesn’t just walk to the car; she dances toward us and I can’t take my eyes off her, nor can Sean or Alex. She greets me with a kiss on the lips, while Alex gets a quick one on the hand rather than on his zit-filled face.

  “Kylee, this is Sean,” I say, bursting with pride.

  “Nice outfit,” she says after giving Sean’s frat-boy wardrobe the once-over, then rolls her eyes. “So, are you a sailor with Old Navy, or what?”

  Sean shoots that shy-guy smile first at Kylee, then at me. Before he can respond, she gives him a kiss on the cheek. “Just teasing, kid,” she says as she climbs into the backseat.

  “Wow, Bret, she’s tenriffic,” Sean says, grabbing my arm before I join Kylee in the back. As Alex pulls the Crown Vic back on the road, I feel for the first time like I belong after all on this human highway.

  Five

  September 7 to 14, Junior Year

  “Freak faggot.”

  I outwardly ignore all-American asshole Bob Hitchings’s usual greeting as I take my seat, but the words beat me down inside. It’s first period on the first day of my junior year in English class, the great melting pot that makes big fat fibbers out of our Founding Fathers. All men are not created equal; some are smarter, some are stronger. If Jefferson, Madison, and the rest of their ilk had spent a day at Southwestern, they would have flushed that claptrap right down the toilet. I’m smarter than a lot of people in this room, more talented in the things that matter to me. But guys like Hitchings, who are stronger than most people, and guys like me, who are smarter than most people, are not equals. A born athlete, Hitchings cares about kicking a football, capturing a wrestling-pin fall, and catching a baseball. I’m a born artist who cares about books, music, and theater. In my eyes, he isn’t better than me, nor am I better than him; we’re just different, and different is okay with me.

  Mr. King starts junior English by announcing he’ll be teaching a unit on poetry, well, trying to teach. Coach King, as the jockarchy calls him, or Mold King Cold as Alex, Sean, and I call him, is a good example of man’s inequality to man. No way he and my drama teacher, Mr. Douglas, were created equal. Mr. D. lives to teach, to make us better, whereas Mr. King teaches so he can coach. Scholastics are a bother to him, sports is what matters. Mold King Cold fits right in at my school. People like King pass on the privileged and piss on the rest of us.

  King tells us to choose a poem from the textbook to read aloud tomorrow. Almost everyone sighs, but he just laughs, noting that once we did this, we wouldn’t have to touch poetry for the rest of the year. I raise my hand. “Mr. King, does it have to come from the text?”

  “Coach King.” The look he gives me is like a sniper taking a bead on his target. “What is your name, son?”

  Before I can answer, one of the thickheads in the front mutters, “Freak boy.”

  It gets a laugh; King even seems to smile. I don’t. I look down at my thrift store Dr. Evil watch: less than five minutes into my junior year and it has started again.

  “Bret Hendricks,” I answer, although I suspect he knows. He’s just a dog lifting his leg.

  “Hendricks.” He grunts like my father when he says it.

  “Do I get to ask my question?” I bellow over the laughter in the room. That sound doesn’t bounce off me; it leaves little dents. Like Scottie says on those old Star Trek TV shows, “Captain, the shields can’t take much more of this.” Once the fall play starts, in a few weeks, I can recharge my batteries, but for now, I’m powerless. My fellow actors are my teammates: they give me support, even if we don’t win letters or act as a closed clique. Water walkers like Hitchings are surrounded by people who prop them up, like it was a privilege.

  “Make it quick, Hendricks.” He sounds annoyed. Hell, he is annoyed.

  “Does the poem have to be from the textbook?” More laughter, more annoyance. I sense a pattern developing. Eight more months of this to go, plus another year.

  “Probably some homo poem.” That came from behind me, from Hitchings, just loud enough for me to hear. I wonder who shaved his back each morning and taught him to walk upright. It was during my freshman year and my pathetic attempt to become a wrestler when Hitchings and his bunch first started riding me. They were all athletes, making the mat yet another place where I just didn’t fit—but I didn’t quit. Having no muscle mass, no killer instinct, and a total inability to grasp the world’s oldest sport, which was nothing like the wrestling I watched on TV, I endured a three-month hell of getting my face rubbed into the stinky, popped-zit-infested wrestling mat. They’d be cranking on me, driving a chin into my shoulder or elbow into my groin, spitting into my ear, “You ain’t shit, faggot.” The abuse transferred from the mat to a daily dose of insults directed at both Alex, whom Hitchings calls Alexandra, and at me.

  I had the unfortunate fate to fall next to Hitchings in the alphabet, which in elementary school helped us become friends. But since middle school, when he got heavy into sports, his father started making money and they moved from our neighborhood, we’d stopped hanging out. In any class we’ve shared in high school, he’s bounced pencils off my neck, kicked the back of my desk, and called me names. He picks on Alex too, but he leaves Sean alone, since their dads are friends and they live in the same neighborhood. Sean keeps his distance from him to my relief.

  “Can I read something I wrote instead of something from the text?” I ask over more laughter, determined this year I won’t let jockarchy intimidate me into inane conformity.

  “You just wanna do things the hard way, don’t you, Hendricks?” King shoots back, then smiles. My father asked the same question, and like him, King didn’t really want an answer, not that I owed him an explanation. A very long year just got longer.

  The next morning I feel excited yet indecisive. I’ve got some of my own stuff I want to read, although none of it is as good as the poems and lyrics in Alex’s jam-packed notebooks. But I don’t want to waste it on the likes of Hitchings. I have plenty to choose from in my copy of The Outlaw Book of Poetry. I finally decide on reading the first part of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.

  I never get the chance. King starts from the back of the room in the radical reverse alphabetical order. When he calls Hitchings’s name, there is a low rumble of laughter.

  “Coach, I would like to read a poem that I wrote,” Bob Hitchings says to my stunned disbelief. I’m convinced he doesn’t know or care about the difference between a couplet and a catcher’s mitt.

  “That would be fine, Bob,” Mr. King responds.

  Hitchings walks to the front of the gloomy room. He clears his throat, then starts:

  Alex’s a maggot, Bret’s a faggot.

  Call one freak, other little Bretty.

  I wish they’d both freaking leave already.

  Only Sean doesn’t seem amused at my embarrassment as laughter fills the room.

  “That’s enough, Bob,” King finally says; his tone suggests he’s protecting, not correcting. Everybody acts like nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. “Your turn to read, Hendricks.”

  “Pass,” is all I say, my face turning redder.

  It gets worse. The next incident is a week later. I’ve become not the teacher’s pet, but his bitch. King must be on Dad’s payroll, working the school shift at the breaking-down-Bret factory.

  King is going around the class asking his football followers about the upcoming Homecoming dance. Our band isn’t invited to play, so I have no interest in going. When Kylee and I want to dance or otherwise entwine our bodies, we don’t need any onlookers or special occasion. I notice King’s not talking to anyone else in the class, not to the girls, and certainly not to me.

  “Hey, Mr. King, aren’t you going to ask me who I’m taking to the dance?” I ask.

>   He grunts, which is fine. I have a scathing speech I have dreamed of making one day about the idiocy of school dances and athletics. I’ve just been waiting for an opening, and here it is.

  “I didn’t ask you,” King says, walking over toward me. He leans into me, his wide arms pressing down on my desk, then winks at Hitchings. “I assume you’re taking Alex Shelton.”

  It gets a big laugh from Hitchings and the other thick-necked brownnosers in earshot. The laugh gives me the second I need to do what I’ve never done before: fight back.

  “No, I’m taking your wife,” I shout, getting the attention of the whole room.

  “That will earn you a day,” he replies, quickly and sharply, then returns to his desk.

  “Taking her all the way, know what I mean?” I add, no smile outside, a huge one inside.

  “Make that two days.” Twenty-five other people are in the room, but they no longer matter. This isn’t about them; it’s about turf. He lifts his leg on me, I’ll piss on him right back.

  “How about—” I start.

  “Another word and we’ll make it a week.” He ends it by scribbling a note and reaching for the phone. “Go see Principal Morgan. I’m sure you know the way to his office.”

  King is right about one thing: I’ve clashed with Principal Robert Morgan many times in my less-than-crystal-clear two years at Southwestern. I took my time walking the Stephen King–like Green Mile to his office, listening to the sound of my footsteps in empty hallways filled with drab, tan lockers and drabber off-white cement walls. I walked by the school’s sports trophy display case and started humming an old folk tune that Kylee’s history professor father taught me, “If I Had a Hammer.” I dream of one day smashing the case and hearing the sound of breaking glass as I shatter the jockarchy’s shrine.

  “Coach King phoned,” Morgan says, his face looking like he’d just won a lemon-sucking contest, after I’m finally admitted to see His Harshness.

  “Here,” I hand him the pass, put my hat on, and slouch in the chair, my long legs dangling over the other chair, reserved no doubt for my father if this escalates any further.

  “Lose the hat, smart guy,” he says sharply, thereby convincing me that all school principals must be recruited from the military. “Sit up straight.”

  I salute him, but he doesn’t get that I’m mocking him.

  “When are you going to shape up, Hendricks?” Morgan asks me. He doesn’t care about the answer. Like my dad, he just enjoys asking the question.

  “Maybe I should become a jock, then I would get in shape,” I shoot back.

  “Lose that tone, smart guy.” Attacking the jockarchy was attacking the status quo. Messing with it was messing with the bottom line. “I want you to see Mrs. Pfeil.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I say. Sarcasm is lost on Morgan. Mrs. Pfeil is one of the school counselors. I have a hard time reconciling her ability to help students plan their college careers with talking us out of suicide. Maybe it was the same skill: focusing on the future. I know that game because thinking about busting out of high school, and away from Flint and my dad, is all that keeps me going some days.

  “Maybe she can talk some sense into you,” Morgan says, acting like he even cares.

  “Maybe.” I give him an overly dramatic shoulder shrug.

  “She had better. Someone has to get through to you.” His eyes turn away from me, the papers on his desk are more interesting, important, and urgent than me, apparently. “One more incident like this, and it is between me and your father. Is that what you want? Two more and school policy is that you are out of this school. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

  “Whatever.” I won’t play this game, namely because all I can do is lose.

  “Do your parents know that you dress like this?” Morgan has two suits: the dark blue one and the very dark blue one and an endless supply of plain white shirts and bland striped ties.

  “It’s okay with them.” If sarcasm is lost on him, I wonder about the truth. Every time I add tint to my hair, I blow a colorful cruel wind into my dad’s black-and-white world.

  “If the school board’s lawyer, Mr. Walker, would let us have a stricter dress code or uniforms, then you would be lost, buster.” Morgan had a way of talking sometimes that seemed like he was reading off cue cards. I think in his perfect world, he’d just slap us all around and make us drop and give him twenty push-ups. Old school.

  “Maybe I should wear blue suits and striped ties every day then.” That one flew right over his crew cut.

  “Disrespecting teachers will not be tolerated. Your behavior is totally unacceptable,” Morgan says, handing me the official suspension paperwork, which neither Mom nor I would let my dad see, knowing his reprimand would become even more relentless.

  “You’re right; it is unacceptable for King to talk to me like that,” I say, hat off, but spine still lazily bent, even though it was about time I showed a little for once in my life.

  “What?” His eyes are busting so far out of his head that he looks like a frog.

  “Mr. King hassles me,” I say, this confession and confrontation building for two years.

  “That’s not true, you know that.” Morgan was trying to get rid of me. Eye contact was on the downslide, irritating sighs were on the increase. “Coach King is a fine man, a great teacher, and an asset to this school.”

  “He’s an asset, all right,” I say, fighting back the urge to use a different word. Morgan stares at me, and the look of his furrowed caveman brow reflects the Neanderthal tone of school. It wasn’t just Hitchings, it was the whole hostile environment. It was getting pushed in the hallway and having books knocked out of my hands. It was getting called names. It was all of these things. It was everything. And it was me.

  “Have you ever thought, Mr. Hendricks, that if you didn’t act or dress so oddly things would be easier for you?” Morgan says, playing pin the tail on the victim.

  “You’re right, it’s my fault,” I say, unable to rein in my sarcasm in this shit storm.

  “Just keep up with the smart remarks like that, and you’ll spend a lot of time in here,” Morgan says, confident in his ability to predict my future.

  “Maybe,” I mumble, wondering if there’s any way I can ever win.

  Morgan opens up a folder and pulls out a piece of paper. “What’s your father’s phone number at work?” he asks. “It’s not listed here.”

  “Call my mom. She’s at home,” I reply, dodging the question.

  “Wait outside,” he says after a long sigh.

  As I get up to leave the office, I know that I’m not just odd: I must be crazy. It’s insane to keep doing the same things and expect different results. I cram the suspension slip into my pocket, tucking it deep using only an extended, if hidden, middle finger. As I exit Morgan’s office to wait for my mother in the safer outer sanctum, I consider cracking my thick head hard into Morgan’s concrete wall, giving action to the agony of my hopelessness and madness.

  Six

  September 15, Junior Year

  “I don’t think I can take it anymore, Mom.”

  “I know it’s rough for you, Bret,” my mom says, muting the always-blaring TV.

  “It’s too hard,” I say through clenched teeth, anger directed inward at my impotent indecision. I don’t want to be a victim, but I’m clueless as to how to be the victor.

  She nods, then sits down next to me on the dingy sofa in our Value City–decorated living room. Our house is cluttered, and often unclean, since Mom is too busy working, I don’t have time, and Robin doesn’t care about anything except herself, her room, and her girlfriends.

  “I hate those bastards at school. I hate them! Is that wrong?” I make sure to first look to see that Robin isn’t around before I let loose with words not fit for twelve-year-old ears.

  “No, Bret, I don’t think that’s wrong. I think it’s natural, but—”

  “But what?”

  “You can’t sink to their level
,” my mom says, clueless about the whole truth. I told her about the taunts but lacked the nerve to mention my lack of courage as I let Hitchings assault me in King’s class. I knew better than to fight Hitchings, knowing I would lose the battle and the war. Sticks and stones harmed me, but not as bad as the humiliation of his hammering me down.

  “And why not?” I respond.

  “Because you’re better than that,” she reassures me, even as almost daily my dad destroyed my confidence, while my mom built it back up. They were working at cross-purposes, which made as much sense as anything else in their strained and strange marriage.

  “That’s corny.”

  “Do you trust me, Bret?” Her hand is trembling a tiny bit. I noticed that when she got nervous, or upset, her hand would twitch, like she was trying to shake out the stress.

  “Sure, Mom.” She protected me from my dad. How could I not trust her?

  “When people put you down, it’s to build themselves up,” she says, stroking my hair, not caring about the color and length. She dislikes talk about personal appearances, since like many people in Flint, she and Dad are overweight, out of shape, and owners of several XL outfits.

  “Well, they’re pretty tall then,” I say, trying to make a joke.

  “Only if you make them,” she says in all seriousness. “Just consider the source.”

  “What?”

  “Consider the source. These people who make fun of you, do you like them or even respect them?”