Nurrrrrrrrrddddddz, said a demonic Gunner.
The bedroom door opened, and Dad poked his head in with his eyes closed.
“I’m respecting your privacy and asking if everything’s okay,” said Dad.
I reached over to silence my analog bedside clock (sleeping beside your phone has been proven to give you cancer), which had been buzzing. I removed my sleep cap and clutched it to my chest.
“Just a bad dream,” I said through my night guard. “You can open your eyes.”
Dad opened his eyes but kept them discreetly downcast. “I know how mornings can be for young men, and also how certain dreams can produce certain reactions, which is totally cool and understandable, especially with a new girl in the picture.”
“I need you to not be here,” I said.
“Yap,” said Dad, and vanished with a look of relief.
I peeled my night guard out of my mouth and dropped it into its dedicated bowl of distilled water. I slid my bare feet into my high-density memory foam slippers, wrapped myself in a heavy robe to protect my body from the irksome chill of the morning, and began rummaging among my white plastic containers for something clean to wear.
I hesitated at my ManSkirt® utility kilt—an ideal choice for a hot day like today, but blood-soaked bait for the Gunners of the world—and reached for my usual potato cargos instead. But they would not do. Not for my first day as Cirrus’s orientation buddy.
Cirrus had left so abruptly last night. I reviewed our conversation as best as I could in my mind. But I could not tell if I had said or done anything off-putting. Had I driven her away somehow right as we were getting to know each other? I hoped I hadn’t been inadvertently insensitive. I harbored the secret fear that I could sometimes be inadvertently insensitive.
I put on my vintage Kozmo.com tee shirt—an original from the dot-com era—which normally I liked because of its edgy orange and green color scheme, but it now felt stupid and incorrect. All my clothes felt stupid and incorrect.
I opened the door, checked to make sure the hallway was clear, and went into Gray’s room. There I unearthed a black Linkin Park vee neck with moth holes artfully perforating the shoulder and lat areas.
I put it on. Its long-long sleeves were perfectly too long and perfectly frayed. I ran a hand through my matted hair, raising it into spikes. My cargo shorts of course looked completely incongruous, so I replaced them with a pair of black skinny jeans as snug as the Ring of Baphomet now on my middle finger. I wrangled a guitar over my shoulder. It hung low on my hip like a minigun.
I looked in the mirror. Everything was too tight—I could even see my package—and air passed through the moth holes to touch my skin in dozens of unfamiliar places, but I could not help but feel a little wilder, a little more lithe, like a mamba just wriggling free from the flaky gray tube of its old self.
“To metal,” said I to my reflection.
“Breakfast,” screamed a voice from below.
I scrambled. I did not want my parents to see me playing dress-up in Gray’s clothes.
I hefted the guitar back onto its stand. I peeled off the shirt, and now the jeans, hopping, hopping, and shoved them under the bed. I changed back into my shorts and my Kozmo.com shirt. My old familiar clothes now felt baggy and tired and just kind of indifferent. I prepared to descend the staircase into the day that lay beyond.
But I stared at the black clothes lurking under the bed. They were far from indifferent—they were different. They beckoned. They impelled me to stuff them deep into my backpack to take to school.
I traveled carefully downstairs, ate a bowl of oatmeal—steel-cut for a lower glycemic index—and bid my parents à plus tard.
My parents said nothing. They did not notice my unusually stuffed backpack. They were scrolling that long, daily scroll of the American information worker that stopped only when it was time to sleep.
In the garage I strapped on a helmet and donned my skid pads, which, after years of practice, now only took less than a minute—a tiny investment of time for a huge return on physical safety and, yes, style (ask any X Games athlete). I adjusted my backpack straps for even weight distribution. I stood on the platform pedals of my Velociraptor® Elite elliptical bicycle.
But I paused.
There was that Japanese proverb: The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.
(At least the Japanese were open about their conformist groupthink. The American version would be more of a hypocritical camp cheer:
In-di-vi-du-al-i-ty! Be ev-ry-thing you can be!
Long as you are just like me!)
I hated my old ten-speed. I hated how inefficient it was, how it squashed the perineum and abraded the groin.
But I stripped off my helmet and skid pads and took it anyway.
Ten minutes later, I slammed the horrid bike into the school bike rack. Then I eyed the old storage shed at the far end of the lot. I hopped a low hedge, casual as a bank robber, and slipped into the dusted-out, rusted-out vacuum of the shed.
Two minutes later, I emerged like a mamba into the light of a tall grass field. The black vee hugged my chest and shoulders. The pants hugged everything else. My black shoes, being the wide-toe-box variety, actually matched in a teen-Frankenstein’s-monster kind of way.
“To metal,” I whispered, and entered the school.
As I walked, I felt like an astronaut approaching a steaming gantry. Eyes flicked toward me, followed, and flicked at each other in astonishment.
To metal.
I kept my eyes up, chin high, and walked. I felt a confidence buoy my limbs. Could the clothes be unlocking that feeling? Had they for Gray? They were just clothes. But still.
All around, people were giving me the Look.
I giggled to myself. Was it that easy?
* * *
—
“There’s the—” I said.
“—cafeteria,” said Cirrus.
We left the concrete outdoor amphitheater, keeping to the right to avoid swimming upstream in the fast-moving current of students: introspective art girl, loud jock, et cetera.
“Over there is where they—” I said.
“—admin and nurse’s office,” said Cirrus.
“I’ll just watch you guide yourself around campus,” I said. I shifted my books and stuff to my other arm. I had left my Pets.com backpack in my locker. I made a mental sticky to check if there were any of Gray’s old backpacks in his closet.
Cirrus, in contrast, carried nothing. No bag, no lunch, not even a class schedule. Just her in a neat black dress and sunglasses, looking like she’d ditched a wake.
It occurred to me that between her black dress and my black outfit, we matched nicely.