The four of us got buzzed in together the first week, right after last period on a Friday. There was only half an hour between last period and practice. It wasn’t much time. And you had to do fifteen push-ups for every minute you were late to practice. I wasn’t that good at push-ups and doing more than ten was humiliating, so I made sure I was never late. I always went to the locker room right away after chemistry.
That day, I was thinking about something a girl had just said to me at the end of class. She’d said, “Nick, for a guy, you’ve got such pretty hair.” I couldn’t understand why she’d said it. We weren’t having a conversation. We were standing at our desks, packing up our stuff, and she just said it, out of nowhere. But she said it in a really nice way. Maybe she meant it as a compliment, and I should have asked her out. Maybe she was being sarcastic and insulting me, and I should have said my hair was pretty like my dick, and then I should have asked her out. The point is I failed.
This is what I was thinking about when I opened the locker room door and saw like six of the juniors and seniors sitting silently on the benches. This was strange. Usually I was the only one there so early. I let the door swing closed behind me. Then, all of a sudden, I had a funny feeling. I had this sense that I should get out of there. But they were already up. They grabbed me and then I was on the floor.
When you play lacrosse, you get used to being under a lot of weight. We always pile up after a goal, to celebrate. We even did it at camp, where the goals don’t matter. The weight freaks you out at first, like you’re drowning. But you get used to it. I was used to it by then. It was kind of a familiar feeling, actually. It helped me stay calm. I just breathed and tried to play it cool.
One senior straddled my chest and someone was holding my legs and one guy was tugging on my hair. “With this long hair, you’re just too pretty,” someone said.
I wondered if I was really so pretty. Between the girl in chemistry and now the team, I wondered if people were going to keep saying this to me forever.
“So pretty she’s turning me on,” someone said, and they all laughed. I was pissed off, but I didn’t want to seem like a jerk. I hoped I didn’t look pissed off. The guy on my chest was pulling his dick out over his shorts waistband. That freaked me out. But I stayed still. I knew that as long as I didn’t resist, it would be over soon, and then they’d leave me alone. There was a buzzing sound. “Hold still, my pretty,” someone said. “Wouldn’t want to slip.”
Suddenly, I understood what the girl in chemistry had meant. She hadn’t meant anything. She’d only said it because the lacrosse team told her to. They put her up to it, to get me ready. It was part of the ritual. They were all shouting and laughing and the senior sitting on my chest was waving his dick around. It was limp, of course, we weren’t gay. I closed my eyes as he waved it in my face. I kept my mouth shut. I thought about the fact that the girl wouldn’t even have talked to me if I wasn’t part of the team, and how she wasn’t actually saying anything to me. She was just the messenger.
Then I felt someone rub my head and they said, “Like a monkey ready for space,” and the sound had kind of died down, and the weight was lifting off of me, a little bit at a time, like pulling yourself out of a swimming pool, and everyone’s dick was in their pants, and everyone was playing it cool.
“I thought he was gonna piss himself,” someone said. They were all walking out.
Then someone else said, You’re all right, Nick. You’re cool. We’ll see you on the field. Their voices had changed. Like they respected me all of a sudden.
I got up onto the bench and sat there for a second. I felt a little better. Then I stood up and looked in the mirror. My hair was gone, shaved off in uneven patches. My face looked strange—bigger. I stuck my tongue out at my stupid face.
They’d left me the buzz cutter. I ran it over my head until I was clean. It left a few spots of blood, but I wiped them on my jersey. A little blood on your jersey looks tough.
When I walked onto the field I was very late. The team was stretching as usual. But it seemed that I was not going to have to do any push-ups.
Sit down, Nick, Coach said, with a nod of approval.
I folded my leg and felt the stretch all the way up my thigh. I looked at Richard. His hair was gone, too. Ham and Alan wouldn’t look up from their knees.
Richard told me later that they’d gotten him in the bathroom outside the gym. After they shaved his head they stuck it in the toilet. His face wasn’t in the water, though. Just the top of his head. It wasn’t like they were trying to kill him. They stuffed toilet paper in his mouth and made him learn one of the sacred team songs. Every time he messed up, they added another wad of toilet paper. He had to get through the whole thing without gagging. This made sense. Richard was a little soft.
But I didn’t say that to Richard. I just said, That’s crazy! All they did to me was put me through the paddle wheel.
Ham said, Same with me. And Alan said, Me too, just a paddle wheel.
It was the first time I had ever caught a friend in a lie. I looked at Ham and Alan a little different after that. I wondered what the team had actually done to them.
But the important thing was that we had all been buzzed in, and together. I felt warm whenever I thought about that. It was humiliating, but at least we were humiliated together. Not like the usual humiliations, girls or parents or whatever. We had been through something important. We’d probably go to state again this year.
I wanted to play well on that first day with my hair buzzed. I wanted them to know that I was tough. The cold air around my scalp and neck felt strange as I ran, but I played well. I played maybe better than ever. I wondered if maybe, all this time when I felt humiliated, when I was alone and lonely, when I didn’t know what to say to a girl, maybe all this time it was my hair that was holding me back.
* * *
• • •
AFTER PRACTICE one of the seniors, Dean McGarvey, said, Hey. You maggots wanna hang out? So Richard and Ham got in his car, and Alan and I rode with Matt Komen and Sam Simpson. We threaded back through the neighborhoods to one of the guys’ houses. We parked on the street and walked around back. The lawn sloped down to a dock that stretched into the Chesapeake Bay. The sun was starting to set behind us and the sky was all pink. The dock stuck out like a middle finger.
It’s Coach’s, Dean said to someone.
“What?” Richard said.
I was annoyed at Richard for reminding the others that we were newbies. It’s Coach’s house, I told him, trying to play it cool, like I’d known all along. I hoped I was right.
I was. The seniors explained that Coach’s son was a senior when they were sophomores, and they were still allowed to use the dock, just not to go into the house. So if you gotta pee, you gotta pee in the bay. It’s nature’s toilet, Gary Wooten said. We all laughed and sat on the weathered wood and marveled: we were at Coach’s house.