“Sometimes,” Toshi said, “I think he really hates us. But he keeps us around because we’re the only ones who do what he says. Maybe we shouldn’t do it. Feed right into him. Like he’s a tapeworm or something, gobbling us up, getting stronger.”
“You watch too much TV,” I said. “He’s just Jay. Our friend.”
Toshi yelped; his bike swerved. He took his hands from the handlebars and massaged his temples; he must’ve had another headache, the worm eating his brain.
I slowed my pedaling to keep pace with him. “Chill out. Today was nothing. Probably Jay just doesn’t want to go home. I mean, think about his parents. They really are sort of awful. They’re always whispering to each other, like they’re talking bad about everyone else. They never go to restaurants, but in the kitchen they only have frozen stuff and stuff in cans and boxes.” I talked best with Toshi this way, on our bikes, the wind rushing against our faces, sort of pushing the words back in.
“I think there’s something wrong with him,” Toshi said, “I really do.”
“You sound like a taint.” Tosh must have been more upset about Jay forcing him to carry those pallets than I’d realized. “You think there’s something wrong with everyone.”
“But really,” Toshi said, “you don’t ever get the sense that Jay is…crazy, maybe?”
“No way,” I said. “Or maybe we’re all a little crazy. Right?”
“I saw them this one time,” Toshi said, “his parents. In the gardening store, but they brushed right past without even looking at me. Maybe they don’t really know who I am.”
“If you think about those people, Jay came out pretty normal.” I thought of Jay’s parents as loners, but they were always alone together—maybe this made them something else. His mom was small, shorter than me, and real skinny, the wiry kind of skinny, where all the tendons stand out to make you strong looking. She had long hair she always kept back in a ponytail and she was kind of pretty, except for her buckteeth. His dad was skinny, too, but with a tiny potbelly, and he was tall and pale, pale white, with his hair buzzed so short you couldn’t see its color.
I remember the first time I saw the two of them, together of course. I was eight and they came to take Jay out of school early because they were going survivalist camping—he’d been bragging all week about purifying water and eating bugs. The whole time they waited for Jay to pack up his backpack, they were frowning. Usually when parents came to the classroom, they smiled at all us bustling students. When Jay walked over to them, they both reached out to grab one of his shoulders, and the way that their bony fingers indented his yellow-striped shirt as they guided him away has made me feel a little bit sorry for Jay ever since.
As soon as I got home, I ate practically everything in the fridge, and then I spent a long time locked in the bathroom, running fantasies through my mind. When the rain finally started, I only experienced it as a pattering on the roof above my head. Creamed her pants. Like she milked him. These phrases made me think of a sexy dairy farm, Stella the milkmaid in a short, blue, ruffled apron, her pretty white hands pulling at the teats of a cow.
The next morning, I found my dad huddled in the breakfast nook over his cup of coffee.
“How’s the patio going?” he said. His voice sounded as if it hadn’t been used since the last time we’d talked.
“Oh, yeah. The patio.” I poured cornflakes into a bowl and added some milk and raspberries. The berries grew on a bush behind our house, and every summer I looked forward to their tart ripeness, which was more than worth the bramble scratches that tracked my arms for about three weeks running. “It’s pretty okay. Jay’s parents are real task masters. Work, whatever. Right?”
As I was carrying my cereal bowl to the table, to sit across from my dad, he banged a fist against the tabletop. The Santa salt and Rudolph pepper shakers—we kept the Christmas ones out all year round—jumped and clicked together. “We can’t have a conversation,” he said. “When did it start that we can’t have a conversation? I remember when you were a kid, we could talk together for hours. For hours.”
This wasn’t true: I had a great memory, and neither my dad nor I had ever been big chatters. Something was off about him; normally, we comfortably ignored each other, but now he was glaring like he wanted to commit my image to memory so that he could make a voodoo doll likeness later.
“And now.” He waved a hand at me disgustedly. “Not a word. Nothing to say. I don’t even know you anymore. What are you up to all day, huh? What are you even thinking? You could be doing anything; I don’t know. You could be plotting to blow up something.”
“I’m just building a patio,” I said quietly. My cornflakes were getting soggy, but if I started to eat, then I would look like a taint with milk dripping on my chin and my cheeks bulging. So that he wouldn’t see past my lie, I needed to look serious. “I didn’t do anything.” I fretted that he’d somehow found out about my evening in the bathroom, the entire roll of toilet paper I’d flushed, the sad fact that I couldn’t stop before my cock was red and tender and irritated.
He said, “Your little friend Toshi broke his arm. Is that right? How did that happen?”
My cheeks started to burn. “His wrist.” My dad must have seen Toshi wearing that cast around the neighborhood—but he couldn’t have recognized that it was my cast. Still, I worried. “It was nothing. Just an accident.”
“Do you guys push him around? Was it that brute you hang out with, that… Jay?”
“No! It wasn’t like that. Toshi had an accident, is all. Why; did he say something to you?”
“See, that’s the kind of answer that makes me suspicious. I can’t help but think about a few years ago, when that brute broke your wrist.”
“This wasn’t the same thing at all,” I said. “Toshi just fell out of a tree. He lost his balance.”
“Nobody pushed him? Or dared him to climb some rickety, old tree? Or had him stand somewhere with his eyes closed so that he could get pummeled?”
My dad didn’t understand what had happened that day when I broke my wrist, but he’d made up his mind to blame Jay for it, even though it wasn’t really Jay’s fault. The three of us had snuck into the elementary school playground when it was closed for winter break. We were playing this war game, and I’d gotten my sight blown up by a grenade, so I was blindfolded and Jay was directing me around. When I was standing on the “down” end of the seesaw, a bomb blew up and hurled Jay through the air, and he landed on the seesaw’s “up” end, and I was thrown into the sky, and stupidly, I stretched out my arm to break my fall.
We used to get really into these games: it was like our minds could actually build the whole make-believe world. But for some reason, that ability faded out when we got a little older. It was a matter of months that tipped us from full immersion to the double-consciousness that we looked a little silly, and soon after that, the games stopped altogether. But my dad didn’t understand how in the moment, Jay had really felt that bomb hurl him through the air and plant him atop the seesaw. He hadn’t meant to hurt me at all.
“Just watch out for that Toshi,” my dad said. “When I was your age, me and my friends had this one guy, a younger kid, maybe a year younger than us, and we would torture him all the time. Beat him up, cut his hair, rip his homework. It was this mania with us, after a while, and so I get that you can be caught up in the frenzy…” His words faded out and his eyes stared, bleary, at nothing.