20
Did you see his arms, Zach asks me.
We are in his beige room, naked. The afternoon on Sunday. His parents are out, his brothers are out, and in an odd way, it feels as if this is our house. I get up to get a glass of water, and look at myself naked, with my short hair. I have a premonition then, of my future. That this is the start of what it looks like. I go back, and settle next to Zach. He has been asking me questions about Peter.
I didn’t, I say. What did they look like?
Like cigarette burns. Round, red scabs, blistered. James Dean used to do it, apparently.
I think of James Dean. Peter has the same look, at certain angles. The raised eyebrows, the beautiful eyes, the way the whole face seems to lean forward to get your confidence, and, having it, whispers something just for you. I say, He’s going to pierce his ear.
Big deal. Does he burn himself? Zach rubs my head. I like it, he said the first day. Soft.
I haven’t seen anything of it. But I’ll look for it, I say. And I have a memory of pale arms in the dark, hands burning.
I look down to see my hand on Zach’s penis, the silver nail. Soon we will get dressed, leave, we will speak as if none of this is happening. I’ll find out, I say, and unspoken in the air is, to tell you next time.
Zach turns over my forearm. Plain skin, he says.
21
Freddy Moran’s house takes up most of the plot it sits on, a narrow stripe of yard barely surrounds it. He lives in Cape Elizabeth not far from me, in one of the town’s newer houses, on Old Ocean House Road. This house is newly made, the carpeting new, and Freddy has an enormous upstairs room, a sunroof he can climb through to the roof deck, furnished by his telescope, on a steel tripod mounted by bolts into the wood.
Some days I feel like a perfectly normal boy, and this is one of those. Freddy and I eat pizza his mom made and watch television. We wait for the sky to be dark enough to see stars.
Do you like the X-Men, Freddy asks, during another commercial break.
I do, I say. Who’s your favorite character?
Charles Xavier, he says. I like that he can go into people’s minds and see what they’re thinking.
Phoenix is mine, I say. She can blow a hole through the world ii she’s not careful.
Christmas is near and Mrs. Moran comes into the room suddenly with a box that turns out to be full of decorations: pine boughs, modeled birds with real feathers and wire feet to twine around branches, twinkling lights. She begins to put the string lights up around the edge of the ceiling. Hi boys, she asks. How’s everything?
Good, I say.
Are you excited to get away at the end of January, she asks.
I am, I say. I really am.
I thought your solo was wonderful, Fee. You have a remarkable voice.
I think of my mom, hear her say, accept all compliments with thank yous. Thank you, I say.
She taps tacks into place with a tiny ball-peen hammer. Freddy tells us he’s getting a solo soon, for the Benjamin Britten concert in April, at Easter. We’re looking forward to him singing for us.
The television chatters away, merciless. I hadn’t heard that Freddy was getting this, but it makes sense. I want to say, Take your son out of harm’s way. I want to say, Run, go on, get out of here. I want it to be like in the movies, where the dangers are ridiculous disasters no one faces regularly, like nurses who deliberately shoot air into your veins, or villains from Russia who want to fake international incidents. If a robber were to knock at the door, I would know how to respond.
We go upstairs to look at stars. There’s worlds above this one, a night sky full of separate infernos so far away they look to us like they are only tiny lights, and easily extinguished. Freddy and I try to make out the rings of Saturn and Jupiter, but the sky, dear as it looks, won’t allow it.
February.
I remember that this night is very dark. I remember the tour as long dark nights and short days, and starchy, sleepy food. I remember families looking at us, trying to decide what we are.
The motel we have in Bar Harbor is dark, every window shut against a cold night. Beside me, Peter smokes, the only light besides the security light comes from the tip of his cigarette, getting brighter and darker. We sit together in the oily parking lot, on a snowbank. Peter’s crying and I’m pretending not to notice, even though it is the single reason I’m keeping him company.
I’m not, he says. Fuck him. I’m not.
The school concerts had finished to uniform applause, everyone clapping thirty times, more or less. I’d started to count, to know the time it takes for your hands to get sick of each other. The church concerts were bizarre, little pale white-haired men and women emerging slowly from the pews to escort each other home, as if we were visiting a country where only the elderly prayed. We arrived in Bar Harbor, and went to the spitting rock, where the tide shoots up through a throat-shaped tunnel from an entrance just below the water, to blow a spume, accompanied by a basso whump, like a merman clearing his throat. Other such attractions followed, ending in a fish-and-chips dinner eaten in an early, unwelcome dark. After unpacking and watching television for an indeterminate period of time, Peter came to our door, knocking, and drew me out. Zach’s eyes as I left indicated he didn’t want to wait up long for me. The whole trip long, Adam and Merle fell asleep quickly and deeply, snoring loudly together and not waking each other, and so we had been having what felt to me like a busman’s honeymoon. For two busmen.
I’ll be right back, I’d said to Zach. That had been some hours ago.
Now we sit in the parking lot surrounded by what seems a slow nighttime convulsion of darkened houses and bright streets and air that tastes like cold metal between breaths of a cigarette. I’ll tell this time, Peter says to me. Fucking unbelievable.
Was anyone else there, I ask, as if it makes all the difference. As if there are details that will order what is currently resisting order. Peter came back to the room, and Big Eric had emerged from the bathroom with his fly open, partly aroused. Nothing had happened like that since the tour began, and we had all begun to pretend again that nothing happened ever, of that sort. It comes to me that there was a time when we could have said something, but I can’t think of what that time was. As if I have been sleepwalking all these years, singing through a dream, waking only occasionally. And this time out here will end and the dream pick up again.
Our breath looks like smoke. As Peter twists his cigarette, looking at it, I think of what Zach told me about cigarette burns.
I turn, meet his eyes. He sees what is there a moment too late, as I lunge, knocking him into the snowbank. His cigarette bounces to wink a few feet away, and he makes a crying groan underneath me. What the fuck, he says, sobbing. What.
With my teeth, so I don’t let go of his wrists, I pull back the sleeve of his sweater, to see his wrists, crisscrossed with pale red lines, some purple, raised circles. Almost a tic-tac-toe. Knife sketches.
What are those, I ask.
What do they look like, faggot, he says. Just leave me alone. Fuck off me. Get the fuck off me. He pushes, unable to move against me, and then he manages, rolling us over so that he pops up and off. Dick, he says, kicking snow across the top of me. Dick. The snow on my face begins to melt.
Peter, I say. I love you. I sit up, to see his face, dark and wet.
What. Is. This. He yells each word. What. Shut. Up.
A light comes on in a room next to the lot. I jump up and run, hear Peter following me. As I head for the corner, and begin climbing the far snowbank there, I hear Peter’s feet dig into the crunchy snow, and it is like he is climbing my heart. In the lot on the other side of the snowbank, I head for a space between two parked cars and we sit, each facing over the other’s shoulder, assuming the automatic position that allows us to look out, each way. We are panting, and Peter pulls his pack of cigarettes out, and as he holds it up to light it, he notices that the filters were smashed off when I rolled him over. You fuck, he says, holding the pack up for me to inspect. He flicks the filter off and lights the cigarette, spitting out tobacco shreds as he exhales.