Toshi bumped the case of his horn against his thigh. “But the other guys—they’re going to parties and stuff where the girls are.”
“Those parties ain’t for sex,” Jay said. “Those parties are for the girls to crowd into one room and the guys to crowd into another where they can talk about each other among their own.”
“That’s right,” I said to Tosh, though I had wondered myself about what went on in those parties we never got invited to, “we’re the only ones taking real action.”
Groups of girls stood around us (Stella was in her usual clique underneath the oak tree—sometime soon, I would make my move and apologize to her for my father coming around and bugging her when he was flagged), but not near enough—I hoped—to overhear what we were saying. Besides, they all had their own conversations going, snatches of which I strained to hear, to better understand how I might infiltrate and woo them. One girl screamed something about knee socks, and her friend, who had been in my chemistry class the year before, broke into a fit of laughter. They were inscrutable, all of them. But Jay was right: I had something the other guys at school lacked. I had built New Veronia, and that had to count towards my ability as a boyfriend.
The bell rang and everyone immediately broke from their groups and headed for their first class, a promptness which must have been a product of first-day jitters. I walked to English taught by Ms. Dahl, a new hire. Neither Toshi nor Jay were in the class with me, and I really didn’t have any other friends, even though our school had almost three thousand kids attending. Or maybe I didn’t have any other friends because our school had so many students. With that many kids, it was hard to single out anyone.
Ms. Dahl proved to be decades younger than I’d suspected, and pretty. Since Stella wasn’t in the class—I loved to sit behind her and stare at her shoulders hunched over a textbook—I sat in the front row where I could look at Ms. Dahl’s knees, bare beneath her skirt. Her mouth moved, and I nodded, though I wasn’t sure what she was saying—my mind was still stuck on New Veronia and women and their legs and all that.
When I went to the bathroom between classes, the place was crowded with seniors. It was only the first day and already they seemed swollen up with power. Every other breath they expelled was a cloud of cigarette smoke, and they hacked yellow loogies into the urinal.
“Piss off,” one of them said to me.
“Come on, it’s Soppy,” his friend said, “and if you don’t let him do a little wee-wee, he’ll do it in his pants.”
I had hoped that maybe everyone would forget about the whole Soppy thing over summer, but I had hoped that every summer for years; people only ever forgot the good stuff about you. I hurried into a stall—I really did need to go—and listened to them all make fun of me (“Maybe he sits down to pee”—“Doesn’t want us to see what little he’s working with”—“He must be putting on a clean pair of tighty whities”). I felt sort of sick and shaky. Summer had really broken me out of the rhythm of school.
At lunch, I reconvened with Jay and Toshi at one end of a long, plastic table. Jay was talking about soccer.
“We have a real chance to make it to state finals,” he said, “with both me and Mark as forwards. I mean, a real chance.”
Toshi said, “Do you ever feel mad that the football team gets the band and cheerleaders, and you don’t get anything?”
“We don’t give a shit about that,” Jay said. “It’s all about the game.”
“I pretend the football team isn’t there,” Toshi said. “When we play the march, or the fight song, I act like we’re on a stage and the audience came to see us.”
“That’s stupid,” Jay said.
“It actually makes me less nervous. At first I used to feel like puking into my horn, and then the thought of that would fill up my mouth with spit, that nauseous sort of spit. I actually have a pretty delicate stomach. And then all of that spit would make it hard to play—”
“I have history last period,” I said, “with Stella.”
“I can’t believe you’re still into Stella,” Jay said. “I’m going to get her a chastity belt for Christmas.”
“Maybe we’ll help each other with homework or pair up on a report or something.” I finally poked a fork into my cafeteria noodles, which had cooled into an inedible mush.
“Blood is thicker than water,” Jay said. “If Stella asks me to call you off, I’d have to do it. No offense.”
If Stella and I were betrothed, and we got married, then Jay and I would be brothers. We’d be family. Never again would I have to wonder whether Jay liked me or Toshi more.
“If we can’t bring Stella into the fold, if she disgraces the family, she’s dead.”
The ease with which Jay talked about booting Stella from the family made me wonder about his disappeared brother, the mystery that Toshi wouldn’t tell me. “Is that your dad’s rule?” I asked Jay as I studied his wrinkled nose, his chapped lips, trying to see if I could sense a long-lost brother somewhere in his face. If Toshi had been telling the truth, then why had Jay kept his brother a secret from me? Obviously, the brother was dead, or had disgraced the family and was now shunned, or maybe he was a hardcore alcoholic lost to the gritty streets of Philadelphia. The brother might have died as a baby, and so he wasn’t really important to Jay’s life, and Jay had forgotten to mention him to me.
“I got to say”—Jay sucked at his milk—“it’s good to have at least one way to kill your sister in your back pocket. It’s a survivalist strategy. Just like knowing the ways you could kill a bear—any time, any place—if you had to.”
I felt pretty sure I’d never be able to kill a bear or my imaginary sister. I dropped my stiff dinner roll back onto the compartmentalized lunch tray.
“Hey Knees, which chick do you have your eyes on?” Jay downed the last of his chocolate milk.
Toshi set down his spork. “I’m thinking… Cindy.”
Jay nodded, thoughtful. “Cindy P, or Cindy O?”
“Cindy P.”
“Tosh, Tosh, Tosh.” Jay belched. “Cindy P is always making this face like her left eyeball is about to fall out.”
I laughed in the suppressed way that made soda tingle inside my nose, because it was true: Cindy P made the craziest faces, even when she was doing something ordinary like reciting the pledge of allegiance.
Toshi said, “Maybe, then… Cindy O.”
“A good choice,” Jay said. “She has a nice rack.”
“She really does,” Toshi said.
That was when five senior guys came over and told us to get lost; this was their table.
“Come on, man.” Jay spoke to the two of them who were on the football team. “I made varsity soccer this year.”
I couldn’t say anything to back up Jay; if I did, the guys might turn on me and call me Soppy in front of the entire cafeteria.
“Okay?” Jay said. “We’ll leave when we’re done eating.”
Over at the soccer team table, the guys were pretending not to stare at the confrontation. Jay hadn’t tried to sit with them, and I wondered why: because he liked me and Toshi more, or because he wanted to sit at a table where he was the most important one, or because the soccer team hadn’t offered him a seat?
“You move now,” the blondest one said. He grabbed the collar of Jay’s shirt and pulled.
I was already on my feet, ready to give in, when Jay brought up his fists and made like he was going to plug the guy. The five seniors converged on him before he could swing and pulled him away from the table; there was nothing he could do, being outnumbered like that.
The girls were finally all looking at us as Jay, Toshi, and I walked out of the cafeteria in a tight little group.
Toshi said, “What were you thinking, Jay? You were going to pound all of them and be a hero? You would have gotten pulverized and ended up in the hospital. Sure, you’re the smoothest one of us, but that only means you’re the smoothest one of the losers.”