“Oh no.”
Bill was immediately on the wrong side of the thing. In his social studies class, they talked about the coming invasion of Afghanistan. He’d stayed up nights reading the history. Some war-torn country literally known as the “graveyard of empires” and they were going to go bomb the rubble around and occupy? Good fucking luck. “Maybe we should be asking why people hate us so much,” he said in that class as he felt Rick glaring at him, Lisa wishing he would be quiet. “Like is it crazy to think we had this coming? Like, those people think God chose them, but here we all are just clearly thinking God chose us. It’s in the pledge the state makes us say every morning.” The class sat in silence, picking at their desks and fingernails.
In New Canaan High, 9/11 had this element of activation. At lunch, the boys crowded around the military recruiters who came through handing out pamphlets. Students were instructed to write and decorate messages to the troops on stiff pieces of cardboard, which would be “sent to the war zone.” On his, Bill wrote: Try not to kill too many civilians. His social studies teacher informed him that this sentiment was removed from the pile before it was mailed.
His own activation had been a long time coming.
Adolescent identity is an odd thing, formed mostly for hypermasculine young men by their chosen extracurricular activity. Since seventh grade when he and Rick were breaking out as up-and-coming stars of their respective sports, they’d each had a taste of that oozing, slippery product called popularity that had something to do with health and something to do with wealth but simply couldn’t be predicted. Prior to this moment, the two of them made sense. Maybe his parents were college educated and Rick’s parents worked as a police officer and ran a salon, respectively, but who cared about that? About their parents’ levels of education or incomes or worldviews or politics? He, Rick, and Harrington had stories dating back to the second grade. In seventh and eighth grade, they took to quizzing each other on basketball and football plays and joked about Rick’s eerie ability to recall running routes after only a glance (“You’re like Redneck Rainman, Brink”). They made weird bets at parties to set lawn chairs on fire or jump into scummy ponds for Little Caesars breadsticks coupons. They were whip-smart badasses, lambent troublemakers. They were boys.
Something began to change right around the time the shit-eating Texas governor snookered the 2000 election from the doughy and ineffectual vice president. They’d always busted each other’s balls about everything, but this felt different. It bothered Bill. For that period of months when they were counting chads and maneuvering to the Supreme Court, the two of them argued about it the way you’d argue about a bad foul call in the NBA playoffs or an Ohio State touchdown that got called back for offensive pass interference. When Bush got crowned, Rick needled him at every opportunity, including slapping a W STANDS 4 WINNER bumper sticker on Bill’s locker, which he had to scrape off with a razor blade.
Then two planes hit the World Trade Center towers, one hit the Pentagon, and a final one dug a crater in a Pennsylvania field, and almost that same day, he felt a divergence occur between them. Bill observed the flag-waving, the brainless nationalism, the invocation of military might as panacea for sorrow, and it felt to him like a bad movie, a gloss of convenient worship for shared bloodletting. Rick got into it. Really into it. He put a bumper sticker on his car: LET’S ROLL. He took down every football poster and hung a massive American flag in his bedroom, the kind that belongs on a pole outside a civic building. He seemed genuinely disappointed when the operation in Afghanistan came to a quick conclusion (or appeared to). When he turned eighteen the summer before senior year, he would get his first tattoo: a claw mark on his shoulder where invisible talons revealed the Stars and Stripes beneath the skin. Meanwhile, Bill felt like he had to ingest everything he could to counter this jingoism suddenly ejaculating from his best friend’s mouth. His favorite album became Let’s Get Free by Dead Prez, while he checked off all the required reading of a young radical struggling to make sense of history and the social order: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Manufacturing Consent, A People’s History of the United States. The bug gestated, and when he began to see the way the world is—not the way the corporate media presented it, not the way his parents and teachers told it, not the way he wished it was so he wouldn’t have to feel guilt—once he saw the way the world is in its most gritty, tactile, overwhelming sadness and injustice—well, he could never unsee it.
Maybe at that age he was aping left-wing provocateurs, not yet ready to author his own opinion, but Rick was just a Fox News fire hose spraying invective at anyone he saw as insufficiently war-hungry.
So a few months after the attacks of September 11, as the administration began murmuring about a second war, Bill came to school in a black T-shirt with a mug shot of Bush and the words WANTED: INTERNATIONAL TERRORIST.
He’d been in the building less than ten minutes, enduring the stares and glares, when Rick found him by his locker. He’d never seen his friend so angry.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” He pushed close. Put his face breath-to-breath with Bill’s. Rick had this particular scent, a pre-sweat musk that hovered around him even after he showered. It smelled almost of bean burritos.
“All right, don’t get all fucked up over it, Rick. It’s a goddamn T-shirt.” He pretended to look for something in his locker, which was a disaster of folders, textbooks, errant clothing he kept forgetting to take home. He found his varsity jacket and searched the pockets, found his car keys, which seemed like a reasonable excuse to not face Rick and a fury that, he had to admit, surprised him.
“Would you wear that shit around someone who died fighting for your right to wear it?” Rick asked, the muscles of his face taut and demanding a real answer. Even his acne appeared redder.
Bill gave him a quizzical look. It was times like this he yearned for Kaylyn the most. The resentment felt like wolves breathing on the back of his neck.
“You mean like would I wear it around them in the afterlife? Not sure I understand.”
Harrington had been milling near his locker with Stacey and left her to walk their way. They had a crowd now. Clusters of their book-clutching peers stopped to watch this juicy scene unfold. Rick plucked at the shirt, pinching Bill’s skin in the process. “This is some sick shit, even for your unbelievable dumb ass.”
Despite Rick’s Creatine muscle, spreading over his young frame like an exoskeleton, Bill felt the impulse to take a swing and see where it led. He was still four inches taller. Rick had to gaze up at him.
“How’s this…” He thumped a palm hard off Rick’s chest, hoping it would back him up. “Any fucking different from putting that idiot bumper sticker on your car? Just exercising my free speech rights. Isn’t that what you want to go off and kill a bunch of Third World farmers for?”
Rick’s face in motion always reminded him of an angry little boy. It was a face of small features—tiny ears, tiny nose, beady brown eyes. When he smiled, his eyes almost disappeared in the manner of a little kid caught in gut-busting hysterics. Maybe this was because Bill had known him since they were toddlers, but it’s what he always saw when the guy laughed. Now this sense of Rick disappeared, and after this moment Bill never saw him that way again.