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  “No, they’re ass—”

  “Assholes. It’s okay, Bret. That’s what they sound like.” I think it’s the first time I’ve ever heard her curse. She’s real religious, punching her church time clock every Sunday. She prays for me, but I gave up on God long before Hitchings started bedeviling me.

  “Mom, do I need to get soap for your mouth?” I joke, although I wouldn’t put that type of punishment past my father. For the first eight years of my life, he mainly preferred his belt. For the past eight, he takes away the attention and consideration scraps he throws my way.

  “So what they say doesn’t make any difference,” she says, although I doubt she’d been through anything like this as a teenager. My mom is so damn normal it is almost strange.

  “I guess …”

  “It only matters what you think about yourself.”

  “In that case … ,” I say with a hint of sarcasm, slumping farther down into the sofa, wishing it would swallow me up and spit me back out as normal as Mom was and Dad wanted me to be.

  “Bret, I’m sorry that I don’t have any other words of wisdom for you. I just want you to be happy,” my mom says. It’s her constant refrain. As I look around the living room, it was obvious that in my house happy equaled entertainment with my sister’s Anime DVDs, my old professional wrestling videos, and Mom’s piles of used paperback romance novels stacked everywhere. Dad kept his entertainment in the garage and thoughts on happiness to himself.

  “Well that’s part of the problem, Mom,” I reply.

  “What do you mean?” Unlike my father, when my mom asked a question, she actually wanted to hear the answer.

  “I think while you’re trying to make sure I’m happy, Dad is trying to make sure that I’m miserable.”

  “Your father loves you, Bret. You know that, don’t you?” she says, although the frown on her face contradicts her.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You’re too hard on your father,” Mom says, that voice so warm while explaining away my father’s coldness. “He just doesn’t understand you, your music, how you dress. One day you’ll have children of your own and—”

  “I don’t think so, but if I do, I know I’ll be a better father to them than he is to me.”

  My mother didn’t say anything. I was putting her in the middle, and that wasn’t fair, but maybe her silence said more than any words. Silence was welcome, since it seemed once or twice a week, the house was full of anything but. They would yell, then my father would slam a door and retreat into the garage to work on his vintage Camaro, driving off into his past. I never asked, nor did I need to, because I had the timing figured out. I knew every fight was about me.

  “You have to appreciate your father. He’s a good man who has had a hard life.”

  “Well, I guess that makes it right.”

  “I’m not excusing how your father treats you sometimes, Bret, I’m trying to explain it,” my mother says. “He wants the world for you; he just has a hard time expressing himself.”

  “I don’t think so,” I reply.

  “Really, he wants a better life for you, better than he has,” she continues. “Trust me, he didn’t wake up one morning and decide he wanted to manage a car wash for a living.”

  “What did he want to do after college?” My dad never talked about work in front of me. I only knew this was his latest job, his third dirty one since I’d been in high school. He was out of work a lot when I was younger. I learned later that since we didn’t have any health insurance, my ear operations and other health problems got us into deep debt.

  “When your father and I were growing up, we didn’t think about things like that. We never thought about college after high school.”

  “Why was that?” I asked, even though I knew the answer as well as I knew the sound of my mother’s expansive sigh.

  “Bret, don’t act so coy. You’re good in math. Add it up.” I hide my smile. Like my dad’s weekly Monday night AA meetings, my parent’s history was one of the many unspoken subjects in our house. My mom just turned forty. My parents had been married twenty-two years, and my brother, Cameron, was twenty-three.

  “But what about later?” Trying to figure out my parent’s life was my real homework.

  “It just wasn’t in the cards.” I wonder who she is trying to convince, me or herself, that their lives rested more on a matter of fate than fateful choices. “Then you came along, and soon after your father got laid off from the factory and needed to find work. It wasn’t meant to be.”

  “You’re too easy on him, Mom.”

  “And I think you’re too hard on him, and on yourself. He’s a good man, a good husband, a good provider, and he’s a good person battling every day to remain one, but …”

  “A big-ass but.”

  “He’s not perfect, he’s just a person.”

  “So why is he so hard on me?”

  “We’re doing the best we can,” she says, wrapping her arms around me and pulling me close. “I wish we could have a bigger house and some money in the bank. I wish that your father could find a better job and so does he. I wish that Cam could get a better job too. I wish we had money to send you and Robin to private schools. I wish for lots of things.”

  “So do I, Mom, so do I.” I laugh, but she just frowns.

  “There’s a big difference between wishes at sixteen and wishes once you’re past forty.”

  “Why, what’s a wish once you’re past forty?” I ask, falling for her trap.

  “A regret,” she says, getting up to go wash greasy dishes, having temporarily cleaned up all of my troubles. As she leaves the room, I realize that she has somehow pulled all that pain from out of my body and put it into hers. My mother is the perfect empathy machine.

  Seven

  October 8, Junior Year

  “You’re either part of the problem or—”

  “Part of the solution,” Kylee’s mom says, finishing her husband’s sentence. Their constant dinner table chatter, talking over each other and Kylee, is as strange to me as the Thai food we’re finishing off.

  “You need to stand up for yourself, and others, and denounce this intolerance,” Kylee’s father declares, his voice booming. I’d been telling them over dinner about Hitchings and my suspension for talking back to King. While my mother offered only empathy and my father remained ignorant, Kylee’s parents were in solution mode, much to Kylee’s annoyance.

  “Why don’t you run for Student Council and make a speech about your feelings?” Mrs. Edmonds asks, but Kylee seems both embarrassed and irritated by her parents’ interest in me.

  “I don’t think so,” I reply, getting a hand squeeze show of support from Kylee. “I mean that’s like so ordinary. I’ll leave that to the Becca Levys of the world.”

  “Who’s Becca?” Kylee asks.

  “She’s one of these involved-in-everything types,” I tell her, leaving out both Becca’s “mental babe” comment, as well as my unstated interest in her, normal or not. Besides, standing up in front of the school and spleen venting against daily nightmares is just a daydream. It is one thing to act onstage, it is another to take part in a public verbal action against Hitchings.

  “You need to do something. History teaches us that the worst thing for good people to do is nothing,” Mr. Edmonds tells me as he gets up from the table. “Like the sit-down strike.”

  “The what?” I reply, dumb to any history not involving music or movies.

  “The Great Flint Sit-Down Strike,” Kylee whispers, rushing to my rescue. “That’s his favorite class that he teaches at U of M–Flint. Don’t get him started or they’ll never leave.”

  “Right, the Sit-Down Strike here in Flint,” I say, punching the words with confidence.

  “I don’t believe they don’t teach you about these things in school,” he says, annoyed, yet his smile never wavers. “I’ll give you some books to read on it, Bret.”

  I stifle a laugh: he wants to give me books; my dad wants me to
work more, read less. Mr. Edmonds retreats toward the book-filled living room, while Mrs. Edmonds checks her cell for messages. He returns with a copy of Sit-Down by Sidney Fine and puts it in my left hand.

  “Mom, don’t you need to be going?” Kylee says, sarcasm dripping rich and thick.

  “How do I look?” her mom asks us, but I’m stumped knowing if I should answer. She’s a slightly larger, older version of Kylee, although dressed for success not for dancing.

  “Like Robin Hood,” Kylee replies. Her mom heads toward the door, where her dad helps her put on her coat. My father’s appearance reflected his bad habits of smoking and starchy foods, while Kylee’s dad resembles a hobbit; short, sturdy, and slightly round.

  “Robin Hood?” I whisper.

  “They’re going to yet another fund-raiser,” Kylee says softly. “Mom guilts the rich into giving to the poor or the library or the museum or whomever she’s working for. Right now, she’s working for the North End Food Bank.”

  “I thought she was an artist,” I say, since the evening had started with Mrs. Edmonds showing me some of her paintings.

  “Artist, writer, fund-raiser, professor’s wife, community leader, and socialite,” Kylee says. “She doesn’t have jobs, she has crusades. Didn’t you know my mom is Wonder Woman?”

  I laugh loudly, but get it together to wave good-bye to her parents as they exit. “I really like having dinner and hanging with your parents, Kylee,” I say once they are out the door. I set down the Sit-Down book on the table, unsure when I’ll have time to read the massive tome.

  “Do you want them?” Kylee asks, then shakes her head.

  “No, thanks. I got my hands full with my own,” I reply. As much as I like her parents, I don’t know if I could handle them on a daily basis. The main thing I could tell was that while Kylee might be their only child and center of attention, it was hard for her, or me, to get a word in edgewise in the Edmonds house.

  “It’s all about them and their achievements,” Kylee says, as she picks up the last spring roll with chopsticks, taking a bite and feeding the rest to me. “My parents have done and seen everything, so what’s left for me?”

  “Kylee, don’t be silly,” I reassure her. Kylee loved to dance at other people’s parties, but she delighted in throwing herself a pity party, not that I understood why. I couldn’t imagine someone as beautiful, talented, and loved as Kylee having a worry in the world. Maybe everybody else’s life—even Sean’s—isn’t as perfect as it appears when you are on the outside looking in.

  “You know what I call my mother in my journal?” she asks, knowing full well I have no idea and that I long for a sneak peak into her secret life. Kylee might let me in between her sheets, but she would never let me read between those purple covers. Her journal was under lock and key in her antique-looking rolltop desk, and no combination of hints or heavy breathing would allow me a taste of that forbidden fruit. “I call my lovely mother ‘the ShadowCaster.’”

  “Sounds like a villain in a video game, not a superhero,” I joke, but Kylee isn’t laughing.

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” she says. She is, per parental decree, a video game virgin.

  “Well, we’re able to enjoy other forms of physical entertainment,” I say, pulling my chair closer to her and away from the Thai food left from dinner.

  “Well, that entertainment is fun, free, and quite fulfilling.”

  “Kylee, please.” My face turns red, my regular reaction to Kylee’s obvious advances.

  “Are you embarrassed, cutie?”

  “No, it’s just—” I stop short, not sure how to explain my feelings.

  “Despite what some jealous types might tell you, I’m not a skank or anything,” Kylee says, putting her head against my chest.

  “I never thought—” I start.

  “Unlike a lot of girls, I don’t get drunk and sleep around. I sleep with who I want, when I want,” Kylee says, pulling at her short black skirt. “And you, Bret Hendricks, are what I want.”

  “I feel the same,” I say, pulling her closer, connecting her skin with mine.

  “It’s like dancing. When I find someone I want to be with, then why not? Why be alone?”

  The beating of my heart, the racing of my pulse, and the lump in my jeans speak for me.

  “I guess that makes me different, but that’s okay. You like different, right?” she asks, answering her own question. “It’s not that big of a deal for me. It’s not like some sort of crusade. It’s just who I am. If people don’t like me, then that’s their problem, not mine.”

  “You don’t catch any shit at school for this look?” I ask, stroking her violet hair.

  “Maybe it’s just Central or because I’m a woman or a senior, but no, it’s not a big deal with me or my friends,” she explains, as I dream of a school where being the exception ruled.

  “And your parents?”

  “Please,” she says, stretching out the vowels in time with an exaggerated eye roll.

  “They’re just so different from my parents,” I say, stating the obvious. Kylee’s parents aren’t just different from my folks, but from anybody’s parents I’d ever met. The Edmondses treat me like a real person, not a freak boy. While tonight my mom is clerking for Wal-Mart and my dad’s doing a classic car street cruise, her folks are at some event raising funds to feed and shelter the homeless. That fit, because Mr. and Mrs. Edmonds did a great job of making me feel at home in their house.

  “They’re different, all right,” Kylee says, as she clears the cartons of Thai food from the table. This is a perfect example: I’d never had Thai food in my house in my life. Kylee and her parents wielded chopsticks with the same skill that Sean worked his drumsticks, while I fought with even using a fork. The weirdest thing is how I felt different, but not out of place. I always knew that I wasn’t a typical high school misfit, it was just that I hadn’t hit on my fit yet. I’m more of a stranger in my own house, than here.

  “What do you want to do now?” I ask, getting off my exhausted ass to help. While I treasure theater, love singing in my band, and long for alone time with Kylee, I can’t believe how hard it is to keep all the plates spinning, even for someone with as much energy as me.

  “Silly, silly man,” Kylee says with a wink, motioning me toward her in the kitchen. Not that I need the encouragement. “I thought we could nudge-nudge, wink-wink.”

  “Not that again!” I say to my sarcastic sweetie.

  She pushes out her plumlicious bottom lip in a pretend pout, which I suck on with pleasure. With Megan, sex was like a game of strip poker. At each encounter, I’d ante up and she’d surrender another layer of clothing. Kylee isn’t nearly as shy about showing her body or sharing it with me, although now that we are a couple, I wish she would show it off a little less, maybe wear looser and longer clothes.

  “Read the shirt,” Kylee says, pointing at her bright tight red T-shirt with a picture of a woman named Emma Goldman proclaiming, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” She makes it easier to read by tugging on my ponytail and pulling me closer.

  “Let’s dance then,” I say, as we make our way into the living room. The Edmonds’s house is filled with books and magazines hidden under a blanket of fallen feline fur. With five cats, my allergies are full blown, but I’m breathing in Kylee alone, she’s my new oxygen. Thankfully, her bedroom is normally cat- and clutter-free, except for her cool collectibles.

  Kylee is, as usual, a step ahead of me, already cuing up the music, some generic hip-hop. But there’s nothing standard about Kylee’s dancing, which mixes years of classical ballet with the best moves seen on BET. As we dance, she rubs against me and I’m lost in a fever. During the summer, when she would be talking with me, she would sometimes put her hand on my arm, almost sending me into shock, as if electricity were running through my body. Now, after dancing up a sweat, we waltz toward the shower to wash it off.

  We take a long shower, extended by my sincere
attempt to cover every single one of her sixty inches with either soapy caresses or sweet kisses. We emerge into a bathroom deep in steam. Kylee hands me a thick white towel, while I watch the thin beads of water cascade down her body. The steam is making this night seem unreal, like most of my almost two months with Kylee. Though I had imagined it, I never knew if I could connect with anyone like this. I want to believe that Kylee is the cure for all that ails me.

  “Is something wrong?” Kylee asks, noticing that I’m lost in thought.

  “I want to know something,” I say, steam filling my lungs and doubt clouding my eyes. I need to know this is real. From my father to Megan the Imposter to the jockarchy, I’ve been dealing with a load of rejection, so standing naked with Kylee in front of the steamed-up mirror, our images barely reflecting back, I need to understand where we stand with each other.

  She silences my words with a kiss, then moves in front of me, her back pressed up against my front. I bury my thoughts and then my face in the nape of Kylee’s neck, where her white skin explodes into a plume of violet hair. I savor every second, as I suck up the sexiness of her body and the sensations it arouses in me.

  “Look up,” Kylee whispers. I glance up to see written words on the steamy mirror: “Kylee loves Bret.” I’ve been thinking, feeling, and wanting to say those words, but Kylee seizes them for herself and steals my breath away.

  Megan the Imposter said she loved me too, but I never believed her. I’d heard her lie to her parents and to herself about who she really was. Her love was another pose, a false promise, and playing pretend. Megan couldn’t have been mine because she didn’t even belong to herself.

  Kylee takes my hand and leads me toward her bedroom; my happiness is about making her happy. Meanwhile in the bathroom, I imagine that the heat is fading, the cold air entering, and the steam disappearing from the mirror, taking with it the message, “Kylee loves Bret.” As I stroke my all-thumbs fingers along her graceful dancer thighs, I take time on my knees to pray that even when those three words vanish, the feeling never will.