“No?” she asked, when I didn’t answer. “You’d think that after everything that’s happened—the book deal, the advance—you’d be just a little bit happy.”
“I’m happy,” I said, automatically.
“Could have fooled me.”
Our faces were inches apart, her eyes on my hair. She moved out of my line of vision, trimming around my right ear. “I’m not expecting a proposal or anything,” she said. “But a little gratitude would be nice… I can give you the number of a florist if you like. Hell, I can call them if you need me to.”
Her snipping was getting increasingly aggressive.
I didn’t know what she wanted me to say. I hadn’t asked for any of this. Her presence in my life had been one big imposition, and now I was supposed to thank her?
“Do you ever think about what life’s like for the rest of us?” she demanded. “People who don’t have the luxury of throwing up their hands? We keep going, Felix. We make it work because we have to…” Her scissors grazed the back of my neck. “The tiniest effort, that’s all I’m asking. Some help. A sacrifice…”
She’d stopped cutting. I could have lied to her, told her that I cared for her, that everything was going to be all right. Instead, I sat motionless in my chair, staring at all the cut hair on the floor. I wondered where the scissors were, if she was holding them in her fist, the way a person holds a knife.
Do it, I thought.
I shut my eyes and waited for the scissors to impale my neck, feeling her desire, knowing she was capable of it. Instead, she just sighed and started tidying up the back. A few last tufts of hair drifted to the floor, nearly weightless. When she’d finished, she brought a hand mirror around to the front of the chair and held it under her chin so that my face appeared to be embedded in her chest. I ran my fingers through my hair, surprised by how well the cut suited me.
“Like a new man,” I said, softly.
CHAPTER FOUR
“I told you not to look at me,” Chad muttered as he ground my face into the snow. “Didn’t I tell you not to look at me?”
“I didn’t!” I gasped.
Nearly twice my size, Chad straddled me like a professional wrestler, bending my arms and legs in ways they weren’t supposed to bend, as if I were an action figure he’d gotten for Christmas. None of the other kids on the playground moved to help, watching with solemn faces as he forced my head back down. I had no idea what I’d done to deserve such a beating (I hadn’t looked at him—quite the opposite), but Chad was enjoying himself now, putting on a show for the kids who were shielding us from the playground monitors. “Who wants to see it?” he asked them. “Who wants to see Fee-lee’s tiny dick?”
“No!” I hollered, fighting to break free.
But Chad had already rolled me over and jerked the front of my sweatpants and underwear down with his free hand. The moment the cold air hit my hairless genitals, I went slack, like a rabbit that knows it’s about to die.
“Oh my God!” he laughed. “Anyone got a magnifying glass?”
The school bell rang and he released my waistband with a snap. The kids all ran for the doors and Chad trotted after them, throwing a wistful look over his shoulder, as if at a project he looked forward to finishing. By the time I got back to class, I’d decided exactly how I was going to kill him. I’d grab an aluminum bat from the equipment room and wait for him outside the back door of the school. The instant he stepped into the light, I’d swing. The bat would connect with his face and he’d hit the ground. No. One blow wouldn’t do it. It would take at least three. One to the face. One to his defensively raised arm. A third to the back of the head. When he was down, I’d adjust my grip and focus on his upper body—hammering him in the chest, the stomach, his stupid broken face. Other kids would pile out, watching in stunned silence as Chad sobbed and howled at my feet. One or two might run back inside for help, but I wouldn’t let up. I would keep on swinging until someone forced me to stop.
At noon, I looked up from my workbook. I’d been so caught up in the fantasy, running it over compulsively in my mind, adding satisfying little details and flourishes (the angle of his smashed nose, the faint wheeze of his failing breath) that I had absolutely no idea what I’d been doing for the last hour and a half. Math, from the look of it. I tucked the book into my desk and grabbed my coat and gloves from my locker. The routine required no thought. I would be home in ten minutes, eating a sandwich in front of the television. My breath leaped from my body as I stepped out of the school, the murderous film still looping through my head. I was making gestures now, jerky little half-swings, muttering through my teeth as I stared down at Chad’s swollen, battered face, his trembling hands rising in one last plea for mercy. I beat them down. This was happening. It was real as anything I’d ever done. The surrounding houses faded, as if they were the things being imagined. I didn’t see the sheen of black ice on the road ahead. I had no awareness of the teal blue Chevy Nova bearing down on the intersection I was about to step into. In that particular moment, I wasn’t seeing anything but blood, or hearing anything but my own frenzied screams.
The world flickered.
I reared back in my chair, trying to make sense of the scene coming into focus around me. Kim and two strangers, sitting across from me at a small table. Stuttering lights. Bass thudding up from the floor. Across the club, a woman in a G-string stood on an elevated stage, moving her hips broadly as she danced. Kim yelled to be heard over the music, saying something that sounded like “money” to a bald man beside her who appeared to have fallen asleep. When I recognized the other person at our table as the superintendent of my building—garishly made up, in a tight black dress—I nearly shouted in surprise.
You all right? Kim mouthed at me.
I tried to stand up, but couldn’t catch hold of the room’s spinning edges. The glass in front of me was filled with a green liquid that glowed under the black lights of the club. My mouth tasted like hard candy and ash. As the stripper on the platform sleepily removed her G-string, the superintendent’s foot bumped up against mine under the table and stayed there. Kim started to laugh. She laughed until tears rolled down her face and the superintendent began giggling along with her. The bald man jerked awake, his eyes falling on me, and he too started to laugh. Up on the platform, the stripper was spinning around the pole, fully naked. Only when my stomach began to hurt did I realize that I was laughing harder than any of them, and none of us, our faces twisted grotesquely, as if in pain, seemed to be able to stop.
“Where was your head?” Dad shouted. He was pacing around my bed in what looked like a hospital room. Tubes ran into my body at multiple points. Plaster immobilized my elevated leg from calf to thigh. My sister sat in a chair across the room, hugging her knees and eyeing me narrowly. The last thing I remembered was hoisting a bloody bat and drawing a bead on Chad Temple’s barely recognizable face. I couldn’t imagine how I’d ended up in the hospital, but Dad’s tone left no doubt that I had only myself to blame.
“I’m sorry,” I croaked.
Dad stopped pacing. “Sorry? Jesus Christ, you don’t have to be sorry, Felix. You have to be careful. Next time you might not be so lucky.”