I did get bored. I didn’t know anyone in the entire town or state and didn’t have a working phone. Masturbation took heroic effort I wasn’t up to. Well, once. Okay, twice. Okay, never mind. I rehearsed conversation starters to use if I met hysterical students at school but couldn’t think of any besides “How many fingers am I holding up?” “Please don’t bite off my face,” and “Do you ever feel life is so pointless it drives you insane? Oh, I see.”
Evenings, I lay in the bathtub and considered the state of my life, uncovering much evidence that it had missed its potential and become sad and toxic, like Texas.
To wit: I didn’t have any friends. I was in a town full of an indeterminate type of zombie. I had two pairs of jeans and I once went three months without cleaning either, and nobody noticed. I had hair that looked unwashed no matter how much I washed it. I had a build you could describe, if you’re feeling charitable, as going to fill out. (I do have a list of all the places I will be adding muscle. When I’m done, it’ll be sweet.) The whole package has been described to me as decent but reckless-looking, like the guy in the teen movie who dies doing drugs in the first scene so that the main characters can learn important lessons about not doing drugs.
That’s me, more or less. Doomed and in need of a shower.
And you know what? Who cares?
Why? Because the world is a fucking shitshow.
Where do you even start? Seabirds hatch on Pacific beaches and in the ecstasy of their chickatude eat the most colorful plastic they can find. Fad drugs too new to have names are swallowed by college students by the fistful, soupifying their brains. Deer gnaw off their legs to escape forgotten traps. Deep coronary arteries store undigested Happy Meals. That girl will drive into a semi while texting, “I’m on my way, can’t wait !” At the playground, a mother does not hear her baby crying, because she is too busy checking Facebook on her phone. Everyone has a happier life than her. They go on vacations to resorts that serve cocktails right in the pool! They take selfies behind waterfalls!
And men in suits swear to us they have identified the source of the shitshow and that carpet bombing said source will eliminate it, and so our missiles soar across the oceans on missions of peaceful shit-cleaning and explode in impoverished desert villages on the other side of the world. Our God says your God is a fake God, suckers! Eat this! But oh! The fake God does not agree! He goes to a shopping mall in Atlanta and blows himself up. Ball bearings in the perfume counter! Blown-off limbs in the jeans rack! The forests on fire!
Do you see it? How can anyone not see it at this point?
* * *
—
My father did emerge on Monday morning for a half hour to take me to North Homer High School for my first day there. He’d been working hard all weekend, and his dark eyes were ringed in black underneath his black company ball cap. He looked like a shadow that had gotten roughed up in an alley by other, darker shadows.
The school was a dead brick turtle in the bottom of a valley, hemmed in by hundred-year-old maple trees, untrimmed hedges, and incongruously pristine athletic fields. There were signs out front for the upcoming homecoming football game and a PTA meeting, as well as for spray foam insulation and less restrictive gun laws. At the front entrance, Dad fished a crumpled twenty out of his pocket.
“Make friends,” he said.
“Good thinking,” I said.
“Be nice to your teachers.”
“Smart. You could write a book on parenting.”
“Got it.”
“That’s what you could call it. Got It: Parenting with Less, by Ronald Cole.”
“I’m late for work.”
“That works, too. I’m Late for Work.”
“Enough, Wallace.”
“Enough. Perfect. Bestseller!”
We’d stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru on the way to the school, and he’d gotten us a couple of sausage-donut things that combine the least healthy parts of each. He’d also gotten himself a cup of coffee as long as his arm. He had to lift the cup in both hands to drink. Mentally he was already back at the plant—if he’d ever even left.
I got out of the truck.
“Hey,” he said.
I turned back.
“Any strange behavior, you steer clear, okay?”
“Dad, you just defined high school.”
He sighed deeply. “It’s for your own good, Wallace.”
* * *
—
Morning I spent in the principal’s waiting room, waiting for the mean-eyed secretaries to put together my schedule. Lunch I passed alone in the cafeteria, eyeing the students for signs of zombie outbreak while gathering the courage to eat. I could not find the courage. The four ashy-colored piles on my tray reminded me of a recent documentary on pollution in West Virginia. In the documentary, dead fish floated down rivers past clumps of tires while white male politicians said the water was perfectly fine. It came out of the trailer-park faucets on fire. On the cafeteria walls, white-teethed kids with ironed jeans ate apples and said no to drugs. Next to the walls were round tables ringed with hard plastic chairs; in the center of the room were long rectangular tables. The round tables were where the cool students ate: the boys who could grow facial hair and had muscle definition and knew that punching each other on the arm as hard as they could was the height of comedy; the girls who threw themselves, laughing, into a friend’s lap, imprinting their bra straps into various male and female spank accounts. Meanwhile, in the center of the room, flannel-wearing acne farmers mind-melded with their phones.
That’s where I ate.
It was normal enough, same as any other high school cafeteria, save for a tension in the air, hard to put my finger on. When students looked around, it wasn’t to see who was watching them but who needed to be watched. A lot of them had apparently decided that person was me—especially two boys sitting at the next table. Shoot. One was pale, skinny as a stop sign, with stringy blond hair and a Pac-Man T-shirt; the other, nearly a foot shorter, had a regular build, an aggressively unattractive starter mustache, and elaborate forearm tattoos.
“Yo,” the skinny one said.
I ducked my head.
“Yo,” he said again. “Yo.”
I stayed down. You can’t talk to just anyone on your first day.
Then: “You’re new.”
A sharp female voice. I looked up. A tall girl with an unbuttoned letter jacket, dark hair, knife-edge cheekbones, an arrowhead-straight nose. Her features looked like they had been assembled in a weapons lab to conduct clandestine missions in failed states with surgical precision. It was intimidating.